Fencing Bear at Prayer

My son, now almost 17, has cousins on his father's side of the family only a few years younger than he whom he has never met.  They live in Vientiane, Laos, with my husband's middle brother and his wife, herself a native Laotian.  My son has another cousin, just born, who lives in Cambridge, England, with his father's half-brother, who is a Muslim convert, and his second wife, who is also Muslim.  My half-brother-in-law met his first wife, also a Muslim, in New York while he was studying at my Alma Mater; she, like me, was an American, while the brothers (if you haven't guessed yet) are English.  My husband's other brother, whom we have not seen since my son was a toddler, lives in York, England.  Their father, my son's grandfather, is now living somewhere in China when he is not in Laos; we haven't seen him since we were in England in summer 2008. Meanwhile, on my side of the family, there are my younger brother and his daughter, who live in Antwerp, Belg...

2011 was quite a year.  I feel obliged in some way to memorialize it, think through all of the things that I have accomplished since this time last year, but I've been stalling all day, wondering what I could possibly say that I haven't said already.  My family (natal, that is, not immediate) has been going through some fairly interesting (read: transformative, difficult, painful, enlightening) times, and there were a flurry of emails yesterday and today recalling (obliquely) all that has passed.  My brother, my sister, my mother, my mother's partner, they've all been through quite a lot of tough stuff.  But me?  Well, I've just spent the year learning to see. Which I can now, most of the time.  It's been nearly twelve months since my surgery and, for the most part, my eyes are fairly stable now.  I don't have to put drops in every other minute or even (which I did have to through most of the summer) every hour on the hour, but usually o...

Perhaps I should tell you a little more about myself, just to put some of my more recent posts into perspective. My parents divorced when I was 11.  I would love to say that I saw it coming, but I didn't, not in a million years.  I have a very distinct memory of walking home from school about a year before, past a house in our neighborhood where, it was said, a woman lived alone with her kids, a "broken" family.   (Gasp!  This was, after all, the 1970s).  "How lucky I am," my 10-year-old self thought, "my parents will never break up." But they did.  My father went on a training course for six months to Florida where he met another woman; she was 20 or 21 at the time, a precocious medical student; he was 36 or 37, a surgeon and researcher at the top of his career.   We got to go to Disney World when we visited him there that summer.  Three months later, he was home, and my parents called us all into their bedroom.  "Your moth...

It's August, which means it's time to worry about my weight--again.  Yes, I know I've written about this before, and every time I've promised myself I was going to stop worrying about it .  But it's there, lurking, waiting to get at me if I let my guard down. Why should this be?  I've read lots and lots of answers over the years, but curiously, every woman writing about it seems to think that it is a problem peculiar to her generation.  Thus Courtney E. Martin , in Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (2007), written when she was 25: "Our mothers had the luxury of aspiring to be 'good,' but we have the ultimate goal of 'effortless perfection.'"  Well, I was old enough in 2007 to have been Martin's mother (just--if I had had a baby at age 17), and let me tell you, I somehow missed that luxury .  The goal of perfection was our goal, too, back in the 1970s.  It is hardly as "new...

To what extent do the names that we are given by our parents at birth influence our sense of being special, unique, popular, wanted or loved? My name is Rachel.  According to baby names hub , at least 547,035 girls born in the United States since 1880 have been named Rachel, but in 1965, when I was born, it was only the 175th most popular girls' name, nowhere near as popular as it would later become in the mid-1980s, where it hit 15th in 1986.  In 2008, it was back down, at 75th (see chart). Rachel as a girl's name Which is odd, because as I was growing up, I always felt like Rachel was a more common name than, say, Rebecca, my sister's name, because I was named after our grandmother Rachel, and Rebecca was not (at least in living generations) a family name.  And yet, Rebecca was the 39th most popular girls' name in 1967, the year my sister was born. Rebecca peaked a few years before Rachel, hitting 15th in 1982.  It was at 119th in 2008. Rebecca as a gir...

Yoga : I've been doing yoga since I was sixteen, since before there were sticky mats, when the only book on yoga that you could find in the local bookstore where we lived was Richard Hittleman 's Yoga: A 28-Day Exercise Plan (1969).  I started going to classes when I was in graduate school up on Morningside Heights in New York and the only yoga studio that I could find was at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center down on 24th.  We chanted kirtan in Sanskrit, too. Writing : I started keeping a diary when I was eleven, writing to "Toni" in conscious imitation of Anne Frank's "Kitty" as a way of practicing for when I would be a "real" writer.  I kept a diary all through middle school, high school and much of college, then again when I was in graduate school.  I did Morning Pages every day for a good five or six years, particularly when I was working on my first book.  And, of course, I've been blogging here now for three. Swimming : I swam on ...

Those of you who have been with me since the beginning will remember that one of the inspirations for my starting a blog in the first place was the excellent series of reflections that my brother had posted on his original blog about being an American living in Belgium.  Well, after a hiatus, he has now started publishing again.  Indeed, he has started a whole net of blogs , in which he plans to reflect upon not only his experiences living in Belgium, but also his teaching and further travels , as well as giving advice to his daughter and homage to his favorite video stars .  Given that he is not only a Buddhist, but also my younger brother (ahem!), it is more or less guaranteed that there is going to be a fair amount of (ahem! ahem!) sibling rivalry at stake in my response to his blogging. What can I say?  It is in the nature of family members to disagree, particularly when they have so much in common.  As, thanks to several of his recent posts, I reali...

My family has so many skeletons in the closet, it's amazing there's still room for the coats. Adultery, alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, mental illness, suicide, not to mention chain-smoking (my father and grandfather, not me!): we've had it all and then some, just in the time that I've been alive. Who knows what else lurks in our past? (Other than slave-owning--yup, back when the Fultons still lived in Virginia before the Civil War; my grandfather seemed pretty sure about this from his genealogical research). And yet, to look at us, we are pillars of our communities: physicians and teachers and scientists and scholars, ministers and artists and Air Force generals. How is it that our outward appearance to the world could be so at odds with our many-storied reality? Being Fencing Bear, I am (as I'm sure you've guessed) itching to write about some of this, if only to figure out what it all means. But I am fairly certain that this would piss off my family; no...

You will have doubtless gathered from my previous post that my (extended) family is experiencing something of a crisis this season. There have been phone calls and emails and txts, but few real ideas about What Can Be Done other than to Stand By Each Other In These Difficult Times. How interestingly hard it is to be of help to one another when someone is in pain, whether from illness or emotional distress. As always, I wish I could write about what we're going through because writing always helps me make sense of things or at least put things in perspective. But when others are involved, I find I simply can't. And yet, ironically, or so it seems to me, if only I could write about it, I might be of help. More help than I could ever be just getting upset over the phone. Some of the things that I might say, if I were asked, not necessarily to any one person, just generally. Don't be so hard on yourself, it isn't all your fault. I know it feels bad now, but what ev...

Somehow, even though we are all thousands of miles apart this year, my family has still managed to enact the regulation Thanksgiving family drama. There are threats of divorce and memories of divorce, threats of silence and pleas for help, accusations of hurt feelings and protestations of innocence, all flying through the air like angry birds aiming for the little green pigs of the people we imagine each other to be. I would say that I'm bored with it, but here I am, still pulling back on the slingshot, still trying to aim my exploding crows at the walls that I think my family have built around themselves in order to protect themselves from each other. And, yes, I'm angry. I have every right to be. It's their fault for not listening to me when I was trying to help. It's their fault for being so unwilling to talk about the hard stuff. It's their fault for building all those walls of ice and wood and stone, silence and privilege and shame, just so as to keep ev...

I don’t get it. I used to really love road trips. The sense of adventure. The sense of stepping out of your everyday life into a transition. The sense of possibility and openness. Now, this trip, I just feel panicked. Not that anything bad per se has happened. Not like last time we made this journey to and from my mother’s house in Texas and I managed to slide our car off the road (there was ice, but it was still my fault and the car was totaled). No, everything has gone surprisingly well. The puppy is having the time of her life—so many new smells! So many new people and dogs to meet! And everybody else seems perfectly happy, content to listen to David Sedaris reminisce about his family while the miles pass under our car. Nor is there anything in particular that I am especially worried about—unless you count nearly every member of my (extended) family. I suppose that could be it, but it feels more existential than critical. Yes, all of us are in crisis one way or another t...

Saturday, August 21, 2010 4:58pm MST It’s beautiful up here, but my iPad’s 3G seems a bit challenged. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to post anything “live” for the next several days. Which is probably a good thing. I’m supposed to be on vacation, but I’m feeling so stressed. I don’t think it was really the drive up here, but I suppose it could be. Maybe it was the program we were listening to in the car. I really hate David Sedaris, but it’s probably because I’m jealous. How come he gets to make his boring, everyday life so interesting, while I’m sitting here, spirit central, not able to think of anything to say? Okay, so let’s face it. It’s been a stressful last couple of months. Last couple of years. Whatever. I’m still angry, still battling my Balrog, still liable to find myself trapped in the dark, anxious and terrified, with nothing to do but go on. We’ve been watching “Soap” on Netflix a lot this past week or so. You know the episode where Jessica tries to convin...

Reasons neither my mother nor I feel like traveling this Christmas: We both like to decorate our own home and have very particular ideas about what kinds of decorations to use. We both insist on driving to each other's home rather than flying, but are nervous about driving on ice of which there is a good deal between the Texas panhandle and the south side of Chicago just now. We both want to attend Christmas services in our own church with the people whom we see every Sunday during the year. We both like to cook our favorite dishes for Christmas in our own kitchens. We both find it difficult to have our routines disrupted. We both promised neighbors to take care of their pets/plants/mail over the holidays. We both wish the other would come visit her because there are so many things that we would like to share with her. And, oh yes, we are both stubborn. But don't try telling us that. We just like doing things the way that we do. And besides, there's so much to t...

I've been thinking about this passage a lot lately, wondering why it is that of all the people in the world who know me, it is only, apparently, my family to whom my faith (or search there for) seems to present a difficulty. For everyone else--colleagues, students, friends, fellow fencers, whether Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or atheist--the fact that I am a Christian is no more remarkable than my white hair (at age 43, no less) or my fencing. It is simply a part of who I am. Sometimes, to be sure, they see it as an invitation to further discussion, for which I am, of course, glad. And, occasionally, there are those who see my hair and ask why I don't color it ("You have such a young face, you shouldn't be gray!"), or others who question my choice of sport ("Isn't that a bit aggressive?"). But for the most part, thank John Stuart Mill*, they recognize my faith as of a piece with my hair color and my hobbies: not as a challenge to their choices to...