Karen Hogan

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Change Happens

The Change.

That used to be the euphemism for menopause — from the Greek word pausis (cessation) and the root men-(month). I always thought it should be called womenopause. But, then I never studied old Greek.

When I was young, it was spoken of in hushed tones, usually to provide a reason for what was perceived as a woman’s irrational behavior. PMS, the term that is, didn’t exist back in those days. (I like the Southern version FTS—Fixin’ to Start. Southern English has such poetry to it.)

When I started going through it, they had come up with a new term: perimenopausal—a less poetic way of saying Fixin’ to Change.

I went to a bookstore (you can already see how times have changed since then) to buy books on menopause. I selected three or four. As I stood in line I contemplated how I would explain to the clerk why I was buying so many books on menopause. I’m buying them for a friend. That’s it. I’m buying them for a friend.

But the clerk didn’t ask me why I was buying so many books on menopause. I’m not even sure she noticed the titles of the books.

It wasn’t that I was ashamed of The Change. I was just kind of freaked out about it. “Your daughter became a woman today,” my mother said to my father the day I started my period. I was 12. I had gotten used to the built in another-cycle-has-completed detector. And if that detector was what marked my entry into womanhood, what would life be like without it? I wondered if I would miss it.

As it turned out, I don’t miss it. Periods seem like a distant memory to me now, almost foreign. And it didn’t undo my having become a woman. I still am that—a woman.

I’m glad The Change isn’t spoken of in hushed terms anymore. At least not in the company I keep and the part of the world I live in. I don’t really mind even referring to menopause as Change, I just think calling it The Change is misleading. It makes it sound so terminal.

Life doesn’t stand still. I think that is what I learned from going through That Change. Change happens. All the time.

I did a major yard clean-up yesterday—or maybe I should call it a yard clear-out. The yard had become very disheveled. I got rid of bushes that had become leggy, volunteers that were confused, and suckers from the Mayten trees. I discovered that the lilac bushes in our yard are heirloom lilacs—a variety one doesn’t find anymore. The lilac tree is even more rare. The crew who worked on the yard had never seen one before.

The yard has a whole new look. It still retains a sense of wildness—but now it’s more like the wild woman who runs with the wolves rather than the confused hippy chick.

Fixin’ to change. That’s what’s happening now. I’m fixin’ to change. I think that’s how change happens. Whatever the event that incites The Change, what follows is Fixin’ to Change. Life changes, then, if we’re smart, we learn where to go with The Change.

The parents of the children taken from them at Sandy Hook are doing that now. Their lives certainly changed. They are meeting with members of Congress to let them know how their lives changed. They are taking action.

“Move on,” is the common formula for how to deal with change. It’s wishful thinking that we can just move on. We can’t. We have to spend the time fixin’ to change.

Perhaps that’s the new cycle I have learned to live with—change, and then fixin’ to change.

It’s all very human.

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I Am a Storyteller

“I am a storyteller. The type that went from place to place, gathered people in the square and transported them, inspired them, woke them up, shook their insides around so that they could resettle in a new pattern, a new way of being. It is a tradition that believes that the story speaks to the soul, not the ego… to the heart, not the head. In today’s world, we yearn so to ’understand’, to conquer with our mind, but it is not in the mind that a mythic story dwells.”
Donna Jacobs Sife

I am a storyteller. There. I claimed it.

My friend Jennifer Simpson wrote a blog post on A Writer’s March titled “Day 28: You are Good Enough.” It’s about losing faith in her writing, and then reclaiming it.

I refer to that voice that questions my faith as the what’s-the-use demon. “What’s the use?” she (in my case, it’s a she) says. “You’re not as good as (fill in the blank). Don’t sound like (fill in the blank). Never will. Who do you think you are anyway?”

Now I know what to say to her. “I am a storyteller.”

If I want to get poetic, I could say, “I am a storyteller, bitch.”

Thirty-four years ago, I recorded my grandmother’s life story. I was about to turn 30. She turned 90 in the same year. I titled her story “Kid, I Can’t Remember Nothin’” because that’s how she answered my first question, “What’s your earliest memory, Grandmother?”

Turns out she remembered a lot: her father returning empty handed from the Cherokee Strip Oklahoma land rush; moving to Lawton, Oklahoma, when there were tents, and then there were houses; seeing Geronimo when he was an old warrior being held captive at Fort Still, Oklahoma; her brother cutting off her braid while she slept in a hammock; marrying her husband; giving birth to five children; the day World War I ended; flying on a jet plane for the first time; the death of her oldest daughter.
At the end of our final interview she spoke about how strange memory was—how things long ago were kind of a haze. “It seems like I can’t remember much of any thing anymore,” she said.

“But, Grandmother,” I said knowing I had the hours of tape that proved it, “it seems like you’ve remembered a lot.”

“Kid,” she said, “you can’t believe half of what I say.”

I decided I would believe all of what she said because it was her story. Her narrative. Her life as she experienced it. It was the truth from her perspective.

I grew up with a lie about women writers. Women couldn’t write interesting stories because they were concerned about things of the home—they didn’t have interesting life experiences like say, Hemingway. So how could their stories be interesting?

After I finished my grandmother’s story, I interviewed a 92-year old physician who had created small emergency centers throughout San Francisco. He encouraged me to visit the University of California San Francisco Medical Center where his medals and awards were on display.

I did as he asked. The medals and awards were hidden away in a drawer in the library.

In our final interview he told me that he had never wanted to be a physician. “But it was in my father’s will that I go to medical school, so that’s what I did,” he said. “Miss Hogan,” he added, “People remember my work, but they don’t remember me.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his awards and medals were no longer on display for all to see.

I had gone into the interviews with him thinking his would be a much more interesting story than that of a woman who married, raised children, and buried a husband and a daughter. My grandmother was certainly no trailblazer. She said, almost offhandedly, that she had wanted to be a telegrapher, but there were so many at home (8 siblings) that she thought it was time she got married. She was only 19.
As I drove home from that final meeting with him, I realized that his story, his narrative, had not been as compelling as my grandmother’s because it did not have the emotional engagement with his life that my grandmother had.

The physician’s story, as it turns out was summed up in his confession, “I never wanted to be a physician, but it was in my father’s will that I go to medical school.”

A life story determined by the will of another, rather than the authentic yearning of oneself.
Writing is, I think, a good metaphor for living one’s life. It is fraught with the insecurity that one might not be good enough, ripe for the demon voice creeping into the space you need to clear so you can be open to the writing muse.

“. . . story speaks to the soul, not the ego . . . to the heart, not the head. In today’s world, we yearn so to ’understand’, to conquer with our mind, but it is not in the mind that a mythic story dwells.
Donna Jacobs Sife

“What’s the use? Who do you think you are anyway? You’re just a woman,” the demon asks.

“I’m a storyteller. That’s who I know I am. It’s not that I’m just a woman. It’s that I am just another human being trying to find and live my story. So bite me bitch,” I reply.

In the end, for my stories to resonate, I have to have faith in them. It is not an act of bending the stories to my will. Rather it is letting them speak through the heart and soul of the life that I have lived.

I am a storyteller.

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The Right of Spring to be Sacred

Kali stood for Existence, which meant Becoming because all her world was an eternal living flux, from which all things rose and disappeared again, in endless cycles.
From The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Last week, blossoms started appearing on the bare branches of the red maple tree. This morning, a blue jay (at least I think it’s a blue jay) tugged at a still-bare twig, and then flew off with it. I assume a nest is being constructed nearby.

Though spring has been revealing herself for a few weeks (this is California, after all), today is the first day I felt her presence. The air is cool and crisp in the early morning, but the light has changed. The sky is intense, Mediterranean blue.

Persephone returns from the underworld.

According to The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Persephone is the Crone form of the Triple Goddess Demeter, the Queen of the Underworld long before legends of Hades/Pluto abducting her for his bride. She is the Death-goddess. She was, in another form, Kali Ma, the Hindu Triple Goddess of creation, preservation, and destruction.

Spring has always been a difficult transition for me. It has never felt like the beginning of something for me. It has been rather confusing.

I’m listening to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) as I write this. There is nothing pastel about it. Nothing Easter bonnet about it. It is the laborious ascent from formless to form.

“Black was Kali’s fundamental color as the Destroyer, for it meant the formless condition she assumed between creations, when all the elements were dissolved in her primordial substance.”
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Now I know why spring was always confusing to me, why when I see the pastel blossoms, I also see the gnarly beauty of the twigs and branches they claim as their residence.

Spring isn’t the butterfly; it is the transition to the butterfly. Caterpillars, I think, are one of the most courageous creatures on earth. They respond to the call to enter the cocoon, in which they dissolve into a kind of primal soup that eventually gives birth to the butterfly. The same creature that trod on the ground, now flies above it—sees from a different perspective.

That is the promise of embracing the ordeal—creation, preservation, and destruction—that life is. In the end, we have a different perspective. What we once knew gives way to what we now know. To grow means to change.

I am not a fan of either matriarchal or patriarchal systems. I think that both tend to require a loyalty to a system over loyalty to one’s heart. So, I’m not advocating for a return to a matriarchal system.

I do think, however, that it is time for the patriarchal system, best exemplified by our Congress (in particular the Republican branch of it) and the Papacy, to give up the ghost. It would be nice if it did it quietly, but it seems like it wants to take as many of us down with it, including the earth as we know it, to prove it is right and powerful.

I am a woman in her sixties. This is the Crone phase of my life. We live in a society that demeans that. Think Mitch McConnell, a man in his seventies, called Democratic women “The Golden Girls” —as if that is an insult.

So while it is not necessarily time to restore the matriarchy, I do think it is time for us Crones to embrace what we have learned as women—within our own bodies we experience the profound way of life that is bound up with death and destruction as well as birth. It is time to call the patriarch what it has become—little-boy bullies—and send it scurrying.

We need to destroy the sentimentality that the patriarch has descended into so that life can ascend.

I ask you, would a society that really embraced the ordeal of life have allowed the poor patients in the charity hospital in New Orleans to die after Katrina because they were poor? Would we really think we have a God-given right to own weapons that are weapons of war—intended to cause as much death as possible in the briefest time? Would we deprive women of the right to make choices over their bodies? Would we think we are all in this alone?

Crones have been dismissed as dried up old women. Really what Crones are are people with the wisdom that comes from living life authentically. You do not have to be a woman to be a Crone.

It’s time for the voices of the Crones to rise and be heard so that what ails us—a disconnect from life itself—can be healed.

It is time for the right of spring to be experienced for what it is.

Bring in the Crones. Don’t bother they’re here.

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Story is the Currency of Human Contact

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee

In 2000, I took Robert McKee’s Story seminar. It changed my life as a writer.

A few months earlier I had lost the family I spent years building. I am a stepmother who had no children of her own. I wanted children, but for complicated reasons did not have them. So I “adopted” my husband’s children as my family.

This was around the time stepfamilies started being called blended families. I think it’s more like throwing everyone’s heart into a food processor and hoping for the best.

I fell in love with my stepchildren. One can’t help but do that when one listens to their tears, takes care of them when they are sick. I was fortunate to have stepchildren who welcomed me in.

I learned that stepparents have to earn the love of their stepchildren. Children naturally love their biological parents. They have to. They need to to survive. So it was a roller coaster of finding the right balance for me. Of opening my heart to these children, then having to let go when I had to take a backseat to their mother. I didn’t blame them, I didn’t blame their mother. I just came to learn to ride the roller coaster of a childless stepmother.

My husband and I did not know the depth of their mother’s dysfunction. She had become a heroin addict. The children, good children of an addict that they were, protected her and did not reveal the hell they were going through.

But, eventually, the shit hit the fan. The pain of abuse turned into rage, and when that happened, the emotional bullets were directed at my husband and me. We got banished from their lives.

I lost the family I had spent years building, riding the roller coaster of finding the balance of loving unconditionally while lowering my expectations of what could be returned. I just never expected that I could be thrown away.

I was traumatized, in shock, trying to reset my life without the family I had assumed would be a part of it.

Six months later I took Robert McKee’s Story seminar. A curmudgeon who believes passionately in the importance of story, he took the stage and spent three days drilling down into what story was, why it was important, and what it has to do with us being humans. Film was his genre.

For your characters to be real, to be believable, he said, you have to have compassion for them, which means you need to understand that the character is right, from that character’s point of view. You have to know, understand, and have compassion for his or her back story.

On the second day, he presented Ordinary People as an example of a story well told. As he identified the inciting event (the moment the protagonist’s life is turned upside down), I became overwhelmed by the story.

It dislodged the numbness that protected me from the grief of losing my family and I began to see my story.

I saw how each person was a character in the story, me, my husband, my stepchildren, their mother.

I saw that each one of us acted because we were seeking to love and be loved, and how life events had twisted this desire for their mother and damaged her children.

I saw that in retrospect, I could not have done anything differently. There was no way I could have protected my heart, that I loved because it was the right thing to do. And sometimes, the cards just turn out the way they turn out.

I got the emotional distance I needed so I could experience the depth of my grief.

At that moment, I understood the power of story. It changed my life as a writer—I became a better one.

My family came back to me. We are better than ever. I have the family I always wanted to have, one that can respect each other’s hearts.

The heart is both fragile and resilient. And so I look for, listen for, and write stories.

I have a life rich in the experience of being human.
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I’m taking part in A Writer’s March. Click on over if you want to join in.

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The Day After the Day After the World Did not End

And I remembered how Earth is a heavy teacher yet is so much loved by the creator of planetary beings. I did not want to leave mystery, yet I was ever curious and ready to take my place in the story.”

~From Crazy Brave, a Memoir by Joy Haro

The world did not end with the Mayan calendar. Or when the odometer turned from 1999 to 2000. Or whenever else it has been predicted to end. There are no end times with apocalyptic endings for some, while others get carried, their bodies still intact, to a heavenly place where they will no longer have to suffer being human, yet still be in possession of their human body.

My favorite take on the end of the world was Maureen Dowd’s opining that it never came at a time that worked in her favor, like while she was staring at the empty computer screen trying to come up with what to write for her column.

End times do seem comforting when faced with writer’s block. Saved by the apocalypse or the dog eating your homework.

There are some who think we must become worthy of god’s love. Or those who say god loves us in spite of our human frailties. But we have to submit to that view if we want to be carried, our body intact, to a heavenly place when end times come.

But that is not my experience of god. I think god is in awe of our being human—that we love imperfectly and with no guarantee that our loving another won’t shatter us—yet we love nevertheless.

I said in my last post that for the residents of Newtown, the world as they knew it ended. For them, the apocalypse came to be. They loved and were shattered by losing those they loved.

Their pain and sorrow rippled through the world. Gave pause.

So in some ways, the world as we know it did come to an end, a week before the Mayan calendar ended.

And so it is time to create a new world, write a new story for our world.

I think Wayne LaPierre is a raving lunatic. His take on the story is to arm everyone to the hilt. In my opinion, he is delusional, living in a paranoid world where monsters lurk and we are armed monster killers. He assumes that we will recognize the monster, and never be guilty of mistaken identity.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

~Fredrich Nietzsche

He also says that the American people are on his side because we value freedom. I hate when people use that word “freedom” so loosely. Freedom from what I want to ask? Freedom from fear is usually what I think. Guns never come to mind when I think of freedom from fear.

But maybe that’s just me.

I started the Writing Shed to change my story. I think really what I was doing was finding my story—the story that is mine to live. And my story is about freedom from fear. That doesn’t mean never being afraid, never feeling fear. It means not letting fear drive me. Not letting fear of mortality keep me from living. Not letting fear turn me into a pitiless monster.

The pitiless monster might be just around the bend. It could be the crazy person carrying a gun, cancer invading my body or the body of someone I love, a drunk armed with a car killing me or someone I love. There is no end to the guise the pitiless monster might take.

So I choose to cherish my life and make the most out of it. The carrot for me is not that I will be taken at the end time, body intact, to a place that has always seemed vague and not really very interesting to me.

The carrot for me is living, to find my story in the story of the “Earth that is a heavy teacher yet is so much loved by the creator of planetary beings.”