Monthly Archives: June 2012

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The hotel is somewhere around here . . .

by Elizabeth

I know exactly where I am. Each time I say this, the folks that know me, go Uh, Oh. They start looking around, become skittish, grab a map, grab a phone, read the fine print on documents. I just think they are taking things a bit too seriously.  Trust me, I say.

Before I disclose any more facts, I do want you to know that I am a very responsible parent, friend, coworker and partner. You are safe with me. Totally.

To myself, I myself grimace, I know exactly where I am, when it’s me that is first to comprehend that I am totally in the wrong place, the wrong hotel, the wrong state. But, I get over it quickly. Life is meant to be an adventure.

Yesterday, I printed out the confirmation for where my family will be staying in Guatemala. I love to research and via the Internet, I explored the 14 villages surrounding Lake Atitilan, and decided the small Mayan village of Santa Cruz la Laguna was the place for us to reside for five nights and six days. It is accessible only by boat or footpath.  There is no road access to or from the village because it’s surrounded by jagged mountains. Amigos de Santa Cruz Foundation and Mayan Medical Aid, two non-profits are living out their mission on Santa Cruz la Laguna. By learning about the non-profits, perhaps my family would have more access to the Guatemalans in the three villages located in the mountains.

It was January when I secured our hotel.  Our trip is planned for this summer. Maybe I picked that hotel because all rooms had a great panoramic view of the lake and the three volcanoes. Perhaps I chose it because all the rooms were set amongst lush tropical gardens bearing fruits and flowers all year long. Or maybe it was workout gym for Jody or the private beach that the family could enjoy. I made the reservation and bookmarked it as a favorite. From time to time, I took a look-see at the hotel, the gardens, and the rooms.

Reading the confirmation I quickly came to the understanding that we were totally in a different hotel from what I had thought.

I fast-forwarded in my mind to landing on the village dock after being ferried from Panajachel, Guatemala. How we would have climbed up the mountain to our hotel only to find out that we didn’t have a reservation and then because there is no telephone system and maybe the Internet wouldn’t be working that I wouldn’t have a clue as to where I did have a reservation in this remote location. Perhaps, Crystel would look up at me and say, Mama Beth is this your most embarrassing moment today?

And I would respond as I always do with, It’s an adventure!

I went back to the email chain certain that “they” had made a mistake. As I read, it became clearer and clearer that it was not their mistake but mine. Goodbye private beach. Goodbye exercise room.

Yet, I also knew that being the researcher that I am, there must have been a reason I changed hotels. Clearly, I showed a sharp detour in my emails, asked them to the cancel the hotel and went with a different place. Now for exercise, we can enjoy the well-maintained paths that traverse old Mayan trails on the steep mountainside. And for gosh sakes, we will be on a mountain, where all views are panoramic. And won’t we be standing in the locale that is mentioned four times in the #1 Bestseller, 1,000 Places To See Before You Die? At least we’ll be in the right spot, alive.

I don’t think the Gopher to Badger half marathon is in the #1 Bestseller. Maybe it should be. It is set along the banks of the St. Croix River about 30 miles east of Minneapolis. I know exactly where it starts, I told my niece. She was training for a marathon and I was accompanying her. Our goal, as always, was to beat the trash trucks and the biffy picker uppers. We are not fast. We aren’t even slow. We are just above walking pace. When we got to the start of the race there wasn’t anybody. I couldn’t figure it out. The town was sleepy. Where are all the people? My niece called her husband and got him on the Internet. He found out that we were in the wrong state. We jumped in our car and raced across state lines to Wisconsin. After parking, we jumped on the moving bus that shuttled us to the start.

Gopher to Badger, Badger to Gopher. Gosh, an easy mix-up.

Trust me Jody, I know exactly where I am and you and the kids are safe. Get ready for an adventure.

A Parental Dilemma

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by Ellen

In 2000, my son Greg was a 9-year-old Cub Scout. He liked hanging out with the other neighborhood guys, going on field trips, and earning badges. He especially loved the camping trips, which took place nearly every month. THIS was the big reason Greg had joined scouts. We camped as a family, but our trips were pretty tame compared to hanging out with other guys, stuffing yourself with s’mores, telling fart jokes and ghost stories until all hours of the night.

But when the Supreme Court ruled on a case that allowed the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to exclude gays, my husband John and I were upset. The BSA contended that being openly gay is contrary to the organization’s values; however, the BSA says it teaches scouts to respect all people. To me, “respect” and “exclusion” are contradictory terms (respectful exclusion?!?).

Even more troubling was the unstated, but widely accepted, assumption that excluding openly gay leaders would keep our boys safe from sexual abuse. The related assumption was that heterosexuals are less risky around children than openly gay men and lesbian women. Because of the BSA’s fears, rather than the facts, they excluded a lot of good people from scouts unnecessarily. John and I both had worked with gays and lesbians through each of our jobs—people we liked and respected. We were so angry about the policy that we considered quitting the pack in protest.

So we sat Greg down to explain our views. He understood that we opposed the ban, and he could see that it was unfair, but it was all very abstract to him—he didn’t know any gays or lesbians. He said he didn’t see how anything he could do would make a difference. He was only a nine-year-old kid.

Finally, John and I understood that we’d stumbled into a common parenting trap—we were filled with political angst, but Greg was not. He was just a kid, and he wanted to have fun with his friends. In fact, he wasn’t all that clear about what it meant to be gay (men who love men, we’d said). And his grasp of sex and reproduction (learned just the year before) was pretty vague, too.

We realized that quitting scouts would have no impact on the national BSA leaders—it would only punish Greg—so we decided not to leave, but simply to make our views known within the pack. Greg continued to enjoy scouting until high school, when he dropped out because of competing demands on his time.

And the ultimate irony?

In 2009, one of the pack leaders, who’d appeared to be heterosexual and who had cleared the background checks, was charged with sexually abusing some of the scouts Greg knew. He was subsequently convicted and imprisoned. We were all angry that a person the pack had trusted had hurt the boys. We worried about them and the emotional harm the pedophile had done. But we never really felt the pack could have prevented the problem—the pedophile, who had no criminal record, had fooled all of us.

It’s pedophiles we needed to protect our children from, not openly gay men and lesbian women.

 

Boy Scout Summer Camp

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by Elizabeth

Antonio and Elizabeth

“Antonio, why don’t you want to go to Cub Scout summer camp?” I had already asked him a number of times but I just wasn’t satisfied with his answer. He always said, “No” when I asked. “Too many bugs,” he offered once in explanation. I didn’t remember any bugs, and I was with him when we went two years ago. I had even brought us a mosquito netting to put over our cots.

Equally troubling to me was why I cared. Why I just couldn’t drop it. Last summer I had signed us up for camp and then fretted the summer away until August as a stubborn Cub Scout Bear growled, Noooo, whenever I broached the subject. Finally, I just gave our spots away to another parent and scout.

Now here we were at year three. I studied Antonio. Sitting on the lowest rung of a  step stool, his arms draped over my knees. Reaching a hand down, I rubbed his dark hair. How I loved him. Yet, there was something not being said. I could feel it, just out of my grasp. Air was thickening with every nanosecond. Then it came to me, fleeting as it had that first year at summer camp when we were making our way up the hill to the mess hall. Waves of men and boys moved about us. Where one group ended another began. I grabbed for the thought, held it: all those men and all those boys.

“Do you not want to go because there are mostly dads with their sons? Does it make you miss not having a dad?” Antonio’s pained look and the dive under his bed told me the answer.

“Buddy, you can ask Uncle Scott or Uncle Marty to take you,” I said.

Peering out at me with a smile, he said with enthusiasm, “You could dress up as a boy.”

I thought, well that’s nice. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be with me. It’s just that he’d like me to be his dad.

I laughed, “I tried being a boy once when I was about your age. I told this kid that my name was Dan, and he wanted to be my friend. It didn’t work out so well. I was always worried about being found out.”

I paused, “What if we invite your cousin?” His cousin is the same age and also a Cub Scout.

“What about Jacob?”

Once Antonio said that, I knew we would be going. He had moved from “No” to bargaining.

I suddenly realized why I couldn’t drop his attending camp. Just like I couldn’t make myself into a boy, he couldn’t make a dad appear.

Sometimes the obvious needed stating. “Antonio, the reason this is so important to me is because you don’t have a dad in your life. You’re a boy and you live with two moms and a sister. We’re all girls. You need to know how to navigate in the world of boys and men. When we go to camp you can look at all the dads and pick out the stuff you like and know that’s the kind of dad you want to be when you grow up and you’ll be able to hang with a bunch of boys and do what boys do.”

Antonio seemed satisfied with the answer.

Sometimes there is no getting past the pain of our lives. Instead of walking away from it Antonio, his friend, and I would buddy up, jump in the pond, and swim to the other side.

Writing is a vocation that picks a person

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Each week, you’ll hear from one of the WordSisters. This time, it’s Ellen.

One sunny autumn day, my husband and I lunched on our porch and planned the classes we might like to take during the lo n n n g Minnesota winter.

“Music is my hobby and writing is yours, so…” he started to say.

“Hobby!?!” my voice veered into a screech. I heard the vehemence but was unable to stop.

“Writing is not my hobby. For me, gardening is a hobby. Making jewelry is a hobby. Writing is NOT a hobby.”

I caught my breath, then resumed, “I have been a writer as for long as I can remember. Even as a girl, I searched for the words to describe what I saw and how I felt. I kept journals and wrote stories.” John put his soup spoon down and listened, eyebrows raised.

“I just meant that we don’t make a living at playing music or writing essays . . . .”

His reasonable comment frustrated me even more. I wasn’t getting through. He had to understand. I tried again, “I was a writer long before I met you or became a mother. And God forbid, if I were no longer your wife or the boys’ mother, I’d still be a writer. I can’t stop being a writer—and believe me, I’ve tried.” Long a manager, he had learned not to let his face betray his emotions in front of troubled or troublesome employees, but I could see he was listening intently.

Calmer and almost resigned, I said, “There have been so many times when I felt like a talentless wonder and tried to swear off writing as a pointless pursuit. The last time I wanted to give it up, a very wise writer named Emily Meier told me, ‘Writing is a vocation that picks a person. No practical person would pick it!’ And she’s right. I can’t stop being a writer—even though I want to sometimes. Whether I like it or not, I’m a writer.”

I ended my fierce soliloquy, sat back, and assessed his reaction. Now that my rant was over, he allowed emotion to flow back into his features. He looked taken aback and frustrated.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I guess I didn’t choose the best word.”

I felt bad for jumping down his throat. But after 25 years of marriage, it would take more than this to rock our boat. I squeezed his hand, then leaned across the table to kiss him.

“I’m sorry, too.”

“So, as I was saying,” he said, “Music is my hobby and writing is your passion . . . ”

“Yes, it is.” Our eyes met and we smiled.