Mennonite in a Little Black Dress ~ Rhoda Janzen

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
by Rhoda Janzen

Rhoda Janzen grew up Ukrainian Mennonite. It was a somewhat conservative upbringing that didn’t really prepare her for what life would throw her way. The year she turns forty-two is a difficult one for her, and it doesn’t end when she turns forty-three.

At forty-two, she is told she needs a radical hysterectomy and the idea doesn’t bother her much. She had already chosen not to have kids, so she figures she will just be going through menopause a little early. (Her male doctors apparently failed to point out that she would be losing a lot of hormones very quickly.) It isn’t even that simple though.

“During the surgery, Dr. Mayler, who is in most cases quite competent, accidentally punched a hole in two of my organs. He didn’t notice. Oops. When I came to, I was piddling like a startled little puppy.”

Enter the colostomy bag. “It took about a year before I stopped intoning St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer every time I sat down on the toilet.” It’s a rough year but her husband steps up and she handles it with good grace and humor.

“Which is all to say that given the surprising events of the Year of the Pee Bag, I assumed I was safe from ill health and trauma for decades. But no.”

Rhoda and her husband move into a lake house shortly before her husband leaves her for a man he met online. Later that winter, driving home to the lake house in the first snow of the season, a somewhat inebriated young man loses control of his car and hits her head on. She ends up with a cracked patella, two broken ribs, a fractured clavicle and some big bruises.

Rhoda wonders, “Had I had time to swerve and failed? Had my misery pulled Curtis’s Jeep Cherokee down on me? Was I a magnet of self-pity?”

It seems like a good time to go home for the holidays. “I was broke and broken.”

Her time visiting home slips easily into remembrances of her childhood, traveling with her parents and siblings. Life as a Ukrainian Mennonite sounds much like the Brady Bunch, just a bit stricter.

The best part of this memoir is the way she relates the family conversations. Humor rolls wildly through absurd conversations with her mother, like the one where she suggests Rhoda marry her first cousin because he’s a hard working scholar who drives a tractor in his spare time.

A board game with family recalls simpler times but ends with a thoughtful rhetorical question. After musing about whether they would be willing to go back in time to visit a place knowing what they now know, Rhoda ponders on whether she would still accept the lunch date with her ex-husband, fifteen years before, knowing what she now does. “Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?”

Her doomed relationship with her unstable husband, her deep love for her sister, her attempts to distance herself from her childhood are all told with great dollops of humor and make for a wild ride. This is a fast paced book that I can recommend whole-heartedly.

Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser

Kissing Doorknobs
by Terry Spencer Hesser

There’s a difference between obsessions and compulsions. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can bring them together into one terrifying package for the person suffering either obsessive thoughts and worries or compulsions to do something they really don’t want to do.

Tara is eleven years old when the compulsions really start to hit her. She’s ashamed and tries to hide it from people. Fire drills are terrifying for her. Her friends and well-meaning teachers try to console her, but it doesn’t work. They don’t understand the basis of her fear. Neither does her mother. Confessions at church are a marathon session because she feels the need to confess everything.

Fifth grade starts off a bit better. Her fears seem greatly diminished. Then, for no reason Tara can discern, the worries return. It snowballs. After a class about drug abuse, she finds out her mother once tried marijuana and becomes obsessed by the fear that her mother is using drugs. Her teacher and parents are worried but, because she is doing okay in school and has friends, they decide not to pursue it. Then she hears the phrase “step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” and things get immensely worse. Her brain repeats the phrase over and over, constantly. She begins to avoid her friends.

“It was a nightmare and I was awake. It was hell and I was alive. It was unbelievable and yet it was happening. Over and over and over again.”

She channels her obsessive behavior into praying. Tara becomes obsessed with praying for people when they swear. Her obsessive behavior strains her mother who has no idea to handle it. She simply treats it as bad behavior. She finally begins taking Tara to doctors and they work their way up to a psychiatrist.

“Odd when you think about it. I’d been counting cracks for almost a year, but it was the praying that I couldn’t conceal and that couldn’t be tolerated.”

Unfortunately, all the doctor sees are insecurities and self-esteem problems. More and more doctors offer different diagnoses but the behaviors continue to mount. She begins touching her front door knob then kissing her fingers, always thirty-three times in a row.

“Instantly and instinctively, I spread my lips out as wide as I could and touched all ten of my fingers to my lips with the exact same pressure. I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did it. It was involuntary and yet voluntary. It was natural and yet unnatural. It was the birth of a ritual that would be repeated many, many times. In fact, from that day on, I was compelled to perform that ritual almost any time I came in contact with my front door. It wasn’t easy. It was exacting.”

Her mother screams and slaps her, acting like it’s her fault that this is happening to her. You want to ask, how can her mother and all these doctors not understand this is obsessive compulsive behavior? And yet, I know that at some point in my life, I have been on both sides of that equation. I have looked at others and said, why don’t they just stop doing that? They need to stop! We tend to look at hoarders that way, as if they are misbehaving, but hoarders are suffering from OCD behavior too.

Finally, a friend of her father’s recognizes the disorder. He is a high school science teacher with a student who has OCD. He connects the two and Tara learns of a doctor who offers behavior therapy for the OCD, but it isn’t easy. It requires her to think about the things that worry her and then not do any of her OCD behaviors. Tara calls the compulsions tyrants in her head and she finds the courage to fight them through her therapy. Her friend, Sam, relapses when his pet dies.

Though this story is not biographical, the author has suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and some of the very compulsions she describes Tara having in the book. OCD, in different levels of severity, is believed to be much more common than previously thought, with 1 in 100 children and 1 in 40 adults suffering from it. It can combine with many other disorders as well. This book provides a moving story of insight into what people with OCD may be suffering. I highly recommend it.

Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

Thinking in Pictures
by Temple Grandin

After I had my daughter, I remember a couple incidents where I had trouble thinking in words. My brain instead thought in images, colors, smells and textures. It was a fascinating experience, but very disconcerting. I put this down to sleep deprivation but it leapt to mind when I started reading about Temple Grandin.

“I think in pictures. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head… I create new images all the time by taking many little parts of images I have in the video library in my imagination and piecing them together.”

Temple has been referred to as an autism advocate and animal behaviorist. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s, as well as a doctorate, in animal science.

Her mind wanders from image to image, making associations. If she wanders too far from the problem she is trying to solve, she is able to stop her free associating and tell her brain to get back to the question at hand. Some people with autism lack the ability to stop their mind’s free association. Abstract ideas are very difficult to grasp for Temple. She has to associate them with concrete images.

She explains that people think along a spectrum - from thinking in words, to thinking in a combination of words and vague images to, like Temple, thinking in pictures that they then have to translate into words. In her fascinating TED Talk she explains it so well. She shows how when she says “steeple,” most people think of a generic line drawing type steeple but her mind pulls up exact photographs of all the steeples she has ever seen until she chooses one. Then she can combine it with other images, such as snow falling on a church, to make it winter time.

One aspect of autism that I wasn’t aware of was the sensory overload that Temple had to deal with, from sound and physical touch. She goes into great depth about what she, and others she knows of, experience. Too much sound or physical touch is painful to her. And yet, she created something akin to a cattle squeeze shoot, to help her calm down with just the right amount of pressure. It’s like a giant hug. She says it calms her nerve endings.

As an autism advocate, the insight she can give to parents of autistic children is a blessing. The insight she brings to how people with autism think and how people in general think and communicate is illuminating. She explains the autism spectrum with concrete ideas to help everyone understand what an autistic person might be experiencing.

Temple Grandin has designed equipment for handling cattle and other animals on ranches, in veterinary hospitals and for livestock companies. “In fact, one third of the cattle and hogs in the United States are handled in equipment I have designed.” This is said without hubris. Her goal was to help the animals not be scared by what they were undergoing, to make sure they were treated humanely. Her greatest joy comes from the fact that she is making the world a better place in some regard.

Her devotion to making life decent and death painless for animals is inspiring. She explains that it’s easy for people who only think in words to deny that animals have the ability to think because they don’t speak, but if you think in pictures like she does, it’s easy to imagine that animals can think. “We owe the animal respect.”

This book shares Temple Grandin’s own experiences in an effort to illuminate all the information she has to share on autism, including her own observations and conclusions. Perhaps people in the special education arena know all about her, I’m not trained specifically in that area though I do have an education degree, but I believe she provides tremendous insight for education purposes. She takes the minute details and makes the connections to the big picture. I want to read all her books now and hear her talk. I can’t resist telling people about what she has to say. I believe she is the best advocate that people with autism could have.

Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

Icy Sparks
by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

March is Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month. This covers a wide range of disabilities and our library is working with the ARC of Steuben County to bring information on these issues to light. That immediately brought the novel, Icy Sparks, by Gwyn Hyman Rubio to mind for me.

I picked up Icy Sparks years ago when I was substitute teaching and needed something to read while a class took a test. I found it fascinating. Icy Sparks details the onset of Tourette’s Syndrome for young Icy. Growing up during the 1950’s in rural Kentucky, Icy’s condition is inexplicable to most people. Her loving grandparents, who are raising her, are at a loss as to what to do. As the symptoms become more and more pronounced, she ends up being sent to a state asylum where her grandparents hope they will be able to make her better. They aren’t able to cure her but in the end they do give her some ways to cope a little better. Back at home, life goes on. They still don’t really know what to do with her. Growing up is never easy for a teen and it’s no different for Icy. First love, losing her grandfather, finding her place in the world - Icy does it all in her own style.

After reading through many reviews on Amazon.com, I found the reviews weighted towards five stars, but spread throughout the five star system. I find this often happens with a book which challenges your thinking. Reviews from people who have Tourette’s Syndrome, or live with someone who has it, differ widely on whether they thought the author was realistic in her portrayal. I suspect this is because Tourette’s Syndrome has many different symptoms and levels of severity. It would be impossible to say what the “typical” manifestation is.

Much of the dissatisfaction with the book voiced by reviewers came from the ending, feeling the religious angle was too blatant and the ending too abrupt. I had the feeling that the reviewers wanted a happy ending where she was fixed but, from the reading I’ve done, Tourette’s Syndrome isn’t like that. It may get a bit better as people age and they learn to cope, but it simply is. It doesn’t make you sick and it generally isn't curable. You simply learn to get on with life. In the end, Icy learns what her condition is, to cope with it and not let it define her. To my mind, it was a very affirming ending.

We all have different abilities and challenges in life. This author took on a challenging topic and created a fascinating character learning to deal with something that is outside the scope of most people's experience. Icy Sparks is at once different, unique, and also like every other teenage girl growing up. I think that makes it a perfect novel for people who want to experience something outside their own limited life experience.

Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks

Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks
By Peggy Lynn and Sandra Weber

Just in case you somehow missed the news, March is Women’s History Month! That brings with it an interesting array of programs here in the Elmira-Corning area. One of the events which will be held here at the Southeast Steuben County Library is a book talk by Professor Louise Sullivan-Blum of Mansfield University next Tuesday night at 6 pm on Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks by Peggy Lynn and Sandra Webber. (The authors will also be in town next Saturday night for a performance of the stories in the book through word and song.)

To most of us, the Adirondacks are that huge state park when you get up past Albany. We don’t really know too much about it except that it’s a pretty wild place. This book brings together twenty-five women who lived and explored the Adirondacks and celebrates their accomplishments. From a hotelier to an abolitionist, a poet to an entrepreneur, they left their mark and were marked in turn by the six million acre park.

Mrs. Arnold was a pioneering woman who raised ten healthy daughters in the wilderness of Northern Herkimer County. The girls were known for their prowess with horses and they made welcome many travelers in their home, building a small fortune from the commerce. Mrs. Arnold seemed to stave off the bad luck that had previously overshadowed the home they moved into with her smudges, that also kept the black flies at bay.

Inez Mulholland hailed from Lewis, New York and was the original super woman before women had the vote. Educated, beautiful, intelligent and energetic, she was a voice for the suffragist movement. She became a legend and symbol for the movement when she died at just thirty years old.

The history of women is not always the history that is told most often in our textbooks. The great and grand deeds of men were written about by men and published by men. In this book, we find women writing about other women, delving into our shared history, when the exploits of these women were often done quietly and yet suffered condemnation by men and society in general. Today we hold them up as paving the way for the freedoms we now enjoy. We marvel at their tenacity given the circumstances. I personally find the tales of their exploits inspiring. I hope you will too.