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.