Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll recalls FAMILY THEMES AND GUIDING PRINCIPLES. She writes:

It’s been a tough week for us all and I felt it necessary to just step away from the vile, soul-sucking crap on the Internet. I offer this little non-political change of pace as a balm.

I was emailing Becki, a great new friend I met a year ago, and she mentioned that the motor force of her family, the Family Theme, if you will, was “What will people think?” I wish I had been imbued with more of that concern. Maybe that accounts for her magazine-worthy lovely home and pulled-together appearance.

Before I got household help, me, not so much. It’s all well and good for a home to look “lived in,” but probably not by goats.

But for better or worse, though my mother was a very kind, sensitive person (and, unlike her daughter, a world-class housekeeper), worrying about what “other people thought” was neither an overt nor unspoken value in our family. Mother was more concerned that one of us would “jump off a bridge if so-and-so did it.” We were definitely encouraged to chart our own paths rather than blindly following the crowd in the bridge-jumping arena and elsewhere.

Mama’s family was one of just three families in the tiny South Dakota town that wasn’t Norwegian Lutheran, so they were oddballs right out of the chute. They were also rock-ribbed Republicans in the era of FDR and she swore to her dying day that beautiful government commodities – huge juicy oranges and grapefruits – were given to Democrats but not to them. It broke my heart to hear about it and, as adults, my siblings and I spent a small fortune sending her Florida citrus by the metric ton to try to make up for it.

Anyway, the discussion with Becki got me to thinking about our Family Themes growing up. For the life of me, I cannot come up with just ONE over-arching theme. I remember the classic scene in Annie Hall when Annie tells the Woody character that in her super-WASP Wisconsin family the biggest sin was “being too loud.” (clearly, I don’t think Woody Allen understood a thing about Wisconsinites…) But he replied that the biggest sin in his New York Jewish family was “buying retail.” (For my Depression-scarred mother, the sin was more buying anything at all. “Make do.” Boy, I hated those two words in that order!)

I was told several things repeatedly besides the universal “We’ll see.” (translation: “The answer is really NO, but I don’t want to hear any more about it right now.”) We were definitely not raised as Snowflakes. Neither parent could abide whining or tattling. We were raised to be tough. My tiny mother was the catcher on her women’s softball team and could break an apple in half with her bare hands. “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” was a frequent, though never carried out, threat from Daddy.

As conservative and somewhat retrograde as Papa could be, he had zero tolerance for weaseling out of difficult things because we were girls. I know it is not a universal experience for women of my era (The Pleistocene Age), but I was never told in any way that there was something I could not do or achieve because I was a female.

My maternal Grandmother, born in the blizzard of 1888, the ninth child in the family, was the one exception. She hated to see “young ladies” in pants, so when we visited, I had to wear a dress and sit quietly and – I am not making this up – embroider pillow cases rather than run around like a banshee outside. I loved her because she was my mother’s mother, the visits were always brief, and it would not have surprised me to learn that she was really born in 1688. I thought she was well over 200 years old when I was 6. Of course, in reality, she was far younger than I am now.

But you know what? It never hurt me a bit to have to do something just because an older adult thought it proper. Respect. Not much in evidence today when a young cowardly thug can harass a 9/11 widow and wish her late husband to be burning in hell. My other Grandma, a Gold Star Mother, would have sent me there with a rolling pin had such a thought ever entered my mind.

I read once that a common saying in Japan is “The nail that sticks up is the one that gets pounded down.” I lay no claim to expertise on Japanese culture, but it would seem to be an obedient and conformist culture. The type that our betters in the elitist class want for all of us unruly Deplorable-Americans, as long as what we’re conforming to is their version of funhouse mirror reality.

That Japanese saying is as far from the American individualist spirit as it can possibly get. I was always jealous that “Live Free Or Die” as a state motto was already taken by New Hampshire. “Land of 10,000 Lakes” – THAT’S what you came up with instead, Minnesota? Inspiring! But if Kyrsten Sinema, God forbid, wins the Senate here in Arizona, our state motto could be “Crazy Arizona: A Meth Lab full of Housewives Leeching off Their Husbands.” Kind of a nice ring to it, if too long for a license plate…

Of all the crap that Obama delivered from on high unto us bitter clingers, perhaps the most ludicrous was his constant pronouncement that whatever we wanted – Voter I.D., secure borders, lower taxes, race-blind admissions – was “not who we are.” To which I always wanted to scream, “How would YOU know who WE are? You spent all your formative years either eating Curried Dog in a madrassa in Indonesia, or smokin’ dope in private school on an island paradise. Your experience as an ‘American’ carries exactly the same weight as Lizzie Warren’s experience as a Cherokee. Like Sgt. Schultz, you know nothing! You can’t even throw a baseball!”

But back to the themes and mantras in my family. These loomed large: Be kind. Be independent. Be brave. Do the right thing even when nobody else will. Do the right thing even when nobody else is looking. God is looking. My Lessons in Economics: Never go into debt. If you can’t save up for it, you probably don’t need it. Whatever you want to do, we can’t afford it. On romance and homemaking: Don’t put bananas in the refrigerator. And the boy won’t buy the cow if he gets the milk for free.

From this sage advice — all well-intended, some ignored — and a ton of love, I made a life. How about you?