Tribute to Grandma Carol, She of Opened Doors

 

The most important day of my life!!

At the age of 45, my grandma Carol went with some friends to the capitol for the April 24th anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. She marched under a giant “Minnesota Mothers for Peace, St. Louis Park” banner with several other women. In a St. Paul Pioneer Press article, you can see her face clearly. She is smiling and appears to be deeply satisfied with where she is and what she’s doing. At the top of the saved newspaper article she scrawled “The most important day of my life!!” in ink. (Two exclamation points!!) The newspaper is from April 25th, and so I imagine that she returned to Minnesota still thrumming with the energy from the march and felt this so deeply to be true that she wrote it down immediately. Either way, after going to college, getting married, giving birth, and raising her two children, in middle-age, my grandma still found taking a long arduous bus trip to Washington DC and marching with hundreds of thousands of other people to be the most significant day in her life thus far. I recognize myself in her in so many ways. I have spent some of the most memorable days of my life marching and protesting with my friends. I can easily understand the conviction that led her to mark a day as the most important of her life. I of course can also understand that there are many more milestones for adults (especially those raised female) than higher education, careers, marriage, and nuclear families. It makes me feel so close to my grandma to see that she so clearly valued community involvement, social movements, and friendships and that being a mother and wife wasn’t her whole story or even the majority of her story. 

I have looked for signs of this in my grandmothers over the years. I am easily disheartened by statements like, “family was everything to her” or “nothing was more important than family to her” because to me, these statements can feel like a subtle way of reminding people where women belong and to whom they belong. (They belong to the family, the home, the husband, the children). I believe that family was indeed important for both of my grandmothers. Even in this article, the fact that my grandma marched under a banner identifying her as a mother, is significant. Clearly, being a mother and having a family wasn’t a small part of her life or self. As for many people, these facts are usually not a small thing. However, I like to believe that, in her heart of hearts, that community, friendship, and activism were actually just as important.

Living in Minnesota as someone who does relationships differently is funny. Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, but it is also the land of marriage and nuclear families. The land of 10,000 closed doors. It is a deeply insular place; there's a reason behind why transplants report how icy and inaccessible it feels here, why it’s so hard to make friends. Many people hang with their high school friends, families of origin, and then add a spouse and then children to their small, closed circle. I am reminded by other friends that living in New York or the Bay Area feels completely different, how many people remain unmarried, don’t have children, and live the sort of life that feels much more natural to me. I feel very out of place here, besides the queer community that is centered in South Minneapolis. Many people that I know in this community have prioritized community, friendship, art, and social movement over the creation of nuclear families. Many people I know are trans, queer, and nonmonogamous. When I venture outside of this bubble (because, it is a bubble), I am reminded that I do not feel at home amidst the expectations that sit heavy on people raised female or the way that peoples’ circles are prescribed and closed off. 

I think what I see the most about my grandma from this article and what she wrote, is that I believe it was her way of rejecting insularity, of saying, yes, I choose the masses, the heat, the bother, the jostling of bodies, the loud voices, the swelling of the crowd, the comfort and solidarity of my friends around me, I choose the sore feet, the inconvenience, the opportunity to be with others who I can’t claim as my own, and yes I will leave behind the husband, the home, the domestic sphere, the family. I love seeing so clearly, in this instance, her choice of community over couple, of inconvenience over the ease of domestic life. How her doors were not shut. I have plenty of examples and evidence of my grandma choosing me, choosing us, being a caring grandmother, being in and of our family. But what I need to see and know and touch and feel is that my grandma, when it came down to it, would also choose the live wire of change and action and seas of people, that it would change her, that she desired to act upon the world with others and have it act upon her. And, when I think of her in her later years, I saw how this seed kept germinating, in the way she befriended, supported, and hosted people from other cultures, how she took in kids that weren’t her own and cared for them deeply, how she never let her heart stop beating for music and art and travel. She was a grandmother who was both with us and beyond us; she was a person who did not have a closed circle. I could understand that she wasn’t on this earth to take care of me or anyone else, and while it sometimes felt confusing—, raised in this puritanical midwestern culture that strives to keep bio family at the center of it all— it also had the taste of a sort of freedom that I would go on to center my own adult life around.