Two Generations

This week I’m going back to pick up a lost stitch … the place where I heard a story that shaped me for years before I really knew what it meant … 

It’s the summer of 1978. My roommate was sitting at her desk, weeping silently. Her face was scratched. She was shaking. 

"What happened?" I asked her, more than once. 

"I can't talk about it," she said, "I need time alone." 

At some point -- perhaps a few minutes, a few hours, or maybe even a day later -- I carried my bike downstairs and pedaled as fast as I could to the Project for Battered Women, where I worked doing child care. 

I walked my bike around to the back, locked it on the stairs, and knocked on the door. Sophie let me into the kitchen that doubled as her office. By the time I sat down across the table from her, I was crying so loud my head hurt. 

She asked the same questions, again and again, "And then what?" "What else happened?" "What else do you need me to know?" 

"I am so angry," was the first thing I can remember saying, "the horrible things that men do to women. They get away with it again and again." Everything poured out, very blocky and theoretical.

"Anything else?" she asked, one last time. 

"No, that's all." 

"Here's what I know," she began. She told me her story. She was sixteen when she got pregnant the first time, just like me. "He was so charming and so kind, except when he was drinking. After our first child was born, he started hitting me …"

Sophie was very thin, her arms muscled like rope and dark brown. She was a person whose way of being conveyed, "you do not cross me." 

One night when her husband was out drinking, she took the children and drove to a safe place she'd found months before. She got a restraining order, and then a divorce. Living on her own for the first time, she assembled a group of women and created the Project for Battered Women, one of the first at the time.

She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. "Carol," she spoke slowly, "you have so much to give. You see things clearly. You're willing to do the work. You're getting the best education money can buy." She paused. 

"There are three things life has taught me," she went on, "first, any real change, lasting change, takes time, generations. For real change you need to change two generations at once: the mothers and the children. Figure out how to do that, and there is no limit to what you can do."

She paused, and I sat waiting for the third thing. "But, Carol, you need to make yourself peaceful first." 

When I was sitting with my out-of-control emotions around Gaza’s invasion of Israel, I thought of Sophie’s words, “make yourself peaceful first.” When I feel the problem is so large and of such a long duration, I think of Sophie’s words, “Make yourself peaceful first.” 

That is something I can do; that is something I can help other people do; when enough of us do that, we produce an energetic shift in what can seem like an intractable, generations-long situation. 

I really didn’t know how to do that until COVID made me sit still in 2020. I heard Sophie’s voice and I was always trying to make myself peaceful, but it seemed to never work. Even after a decade of meditating, I was not a peaceful person. I was an angry person, a person who moved so fast she caused harm to others inadvertently; a person who could be so caustic with words they were like daggers or poison. Yes, I poisoned many relationships by moving too fast with too perfect words.  

COVID gave me the gift of sitting with that, again and again. When I did the same stupid, fast, harsh things again and again. When I hurt the people I loved most again and again. Once I saw that the structures I abhorred and raged against were in me, that I needed to shift all that inside myself – again and again and again – I felt what Sophie was trying to teach me all those years ago. This shift was not like an intellectual feeling, but like my heart was moving slowly around my body, sweeping away stuck things and making space for something new. 

It took more than a decade of daily meditation and using my writing practice as another form of meditation – Story Asana® – so whenever I went to stuck places in my thought processes and the ways I described things, I would pause and then ask myself what it looked like from some other perspective. Yes, a decade of that work, and then one day my heart started moving around my body to clean up whatever needed cleaning when I was on the border of anger, hate, rage. 

Last night, in one of my small groups doing anti-racist work, each of us felt a shift like that happening, over the course of nearly an hour, while we were talking about other things using a very structured, somatic abolitionist process we learned from Resmaa Menakem. 

The test – and I get this test so many times each day – is when I speak in a way that shows my commitment both to Jewish people and the possibility of a Jewish state and to Palestinian people and the possibility of a Palestinian state, whatever they say next, I just listen. I play the role Sophie played for me all those years ago, the day my roommate was raped and I still couldn’t talk about my own rape, and it was all just too, too much.

I take Sophie’s role, letting the other person say whatever they need to say until they speak it all out. 

From that place I’m curious how we might educate two generations at once on peace. There are organizations doing it … just in my backyard, Newark Yoga Movement and Kyds NJ are two local organizations teaching yoga and mindfulness to both mothers and children together. 

Speaking and listening from the knowing – not a mind knowing but a heart and body knowing – that there are always multiple perspectives and a community balances them, inside the individual and as a group, in order to work together … teaching that to two generations, that is the next step.