Tag Archives: aging

Wonder Women and Their Socks

Restart, Uncategorized, , , ,

Last week I wrote about the inspiration of a week full of Wonder Women. From a Zoom meeting of women lead pastors to the re-start of a women’s Bible study at the church I now serve to Baptist Women in Ministry of North Carolina’s 40th Anniversary Symposium (I am still thinking about that phenomenal cake!!), I was filled to the brim in the presence of such Wonder Women.

A more seasoned ministry friend, whom I deeply admire and love serving with whenever possible, noted that the artwork I shared by the immensely talented twins, Sarah and Catherine Satrun did not include her more “full of years” (Gen. 25:8) group.

“None of these Wonder Women look like women of my ilk— you know, decrepit, wrinkled, spry, with compression socks. Jus’ sayin’. In our caricature, though, please do keep the twinkle in the eye!”

This led to a conversation about my love for Wonder Women of a certain age (my years as an eldercare chaplain were some of my favorites!), which led to a chat about WW themed compression socks, which she swiftly located. Always resourceful!

She also found a photo that I immediately saved on my desktop.

YES to every pixel of this. YESYESYES!! Friends, this Wonder Woman was 103 when this was taken! Read more about her here.

YES to those who have gone before and lived with courage and whole-hearted love and perseverance and compassion for themselves and others and who still, as they adapt to the last season of this life, open their hearts to what is now.

That’s my favorite aspect of the Wonder Women of a certain age in my life: the ability to honor what has been—what worked for them, what didn’t work for them, the truth of their experiences without rose-colored or doom-colored glasses—AND to be present to the now, to value that the world is always changing, and to not hold the women or the world of now to the shape and substance of the past.

When I am in the presence of a woman who can hold her story with respect and grace and love and also make room for others’ unique-yet-connected story…I know I am with a true Wonder Woman. That space is holy. That space is filled with the love that makes all things possible.

We can do both. We can honor what has been and what worked in the past and how hard certain things were that aren’t that kind of hard anymore. And, at the same time, we can honor what is happening now and how what used to work isn’t working anymore and lean into the desire for transformation and adaptation. Living with that kind of versatility is wisdom in motion: willingness to be malleable, responsive to the Spirit, leaning into reflective learning.

Years ago, I served a community with two prominent women leaders, whom we’ll call Polly and Alice. Both had a deep passion for loving God and loving others. Each had her own gifts to bring to the table and contributed greatly to the ministries around them.

They could not have been more different.

Polly wore vibrant clothes, laughed often and loudly, and taught her Sunday School class even after macular degeneration limited her vision. She procured a special machine that enlarged the writing in her quarterly until she could read it and kept right on leading the friends with whom she had walked most of her life.

She once told me she planned to teach until she couldn’t see anymore–and then she might learn braille! I’m pretty sure she was joking about the braille. But with Polly, you never knew—she just might do it.

Alice found her niche in missions. She’d led women gathered in someone’s fancy, seldom used parlor to learn about missionaries serving in places they struggled to locate in a map. They prayed for missionaries and raised funds in all sorts of creative ways, from collecting dimes in tiny cardboard church-shaped boxes (which fascinated me as a child!) to selling baked goods and cookbooks and crafts.

Alice struggled hard when women’s interest in missions began to shift from learning about “foreign” missionaries to doing hands-on missions in their own communities or traveling to participate in missions around the country—and even the globe. On Wednesday nights, more women opted for Bible study rather than the traditional missions study. Their call was to study scripture and live it out by doing missions themselves, making an impact right where they lived.

Alice became deeply frustrated when she could not influence younger women to do missions like their mothers or grandmothers did. She worried that “no one cares about missions anymore!” As we humans often do, she couldn’t quite make the shift to what had already shifted and was never going to shift back. Her grief for what she viewed as “lost”–the old, familiar, defining ways–was so powerful and so painful, that she couldn’t quite see the good that was happening in new, different ways of living missions.

I know now that in a way I didn’t know then that sometimes grief comes out with protective fronts like frustration or judgment, which make the grief hard to hear. Looking back, I realize that sometimes, in both ministry and my own spiritual journey, I have missed the deeper grief as I tried to deal with (or duck) the sharper, protective emotions coming my way. I want to keep becoming more attuned to the grief underneath, to listen for its tones in those protective emotions and know that what I am hearing is pain, fear, loss–grief.

During that season of ministry, I told my husband, “I want to grow up and be Polly.” I still do. Imperfect, colorful, determined to use her gifts as long as she could, finding ways to adapt and giving room for new learning. Polly absolutely would have worn Wonder Woman compression socks.

I want to as well. I also want to keep learning how to lovingly tend to my own grief, listening for my own protective measures– criticism or anger or judgment–and recognizing that they connect to something that hurts. And the first step to healing that hurt is realizing that it exists.

As I keep getting fuller in years, I want more twinkle in my eye, more compassion for myself and others. I want to give more room for others to be, to create space for those who come after to make their own ways of living out their faith—and know that, just like I did “back In the day,” they need support for the hard work of figuring it out in their own setting. When the things I hold dear shift, I pray for the grace to grieve what was so good for me for so long and trust that God is still, as always, doing a new thing, a new good thing.

Both Polly and Alice were Wonder Women in their own ways. They taught me so much. I think maybe Alice just forgot for awhile that her tiara could also be a boomerang—more than one thing can be true at once.

In fact, a whole lot of things can be true at once, including the rich variety of Wonder Women, of every age, size, style, spirit and socks.

Photo from https://myfavoritescrubsllc.com/collections/women-compression-socks

Joanne Costantino: Everyday Love and Tenderness

Everyday Theology 2016, , , , , ,

“Let all you do be done in love.” I Corinthians 16:14

connie and frank wedding

As I sat with my Mother-in-law in the Cardiac Cath lab for a ‘versioning,’ waiting for her turn to be prepped for the procedure, I felt my cell phone vibrate. It was my father-in –law. I answered assuming he was just checking on his wife of 60 years.

“Joanne, this is Pops. I’m lost. I don’t know how to get back home.”

`I said to Mom, “I’ll be right back,” and exited to the hallway.

He could clearly identify where he was. I tried to talk him through getting his bearings, but the more we discussed, the more confused he became. I had left an already anxious woman alone while she waited her turn to have electricity zapped to her heart to regulate rhythm. So after instructing him to stay put I called my husband Mike and put him to the task of getting his Dad safely home.

Mom asked what Pops wanted and I somewhat lied, saying I didn’t have the answer he was looking for and had told Mike to call him. But it was obvious she suspected there was more to the phone call.

Once we were through with the medical procedures and well rested at home, we asked if there were other episodes where Dad got ‘lost.’ Mom acknowledged there had been a few, but that lately it seemed to be happening more frequently.

That was over three years ago. After medical testing and evaluations the suspicions were confirmed. Dad has moderate dementia.

mom&pop 2015

My own grandmother slowly deteriorated with dementia. I remember that her ‘episodes’ affected my mother mostly through hurt feelings. But it was my father who truly suffered the heartbreak of seeing his own Mom become a stranger. She often relived years he could not know, those first twenty years of her life in rural Ireland, sometimes speaking in Gaelic as if we should understand what she was saying.

That is where we are with Pops.

Physically, at 84 years of age, he’s still pretty much a bear of a man who did manual labor most of his life. Mentally, his mind has betrayed what he and his wife had counted on as the “Golden Years.” He has always been loving but ornery. Lately he’s been ornery more often than not.

If you were to ask Mom how things are going, she will shrug her tiny shoulders and say, “Hangin’ in there. Doin’ the best I can.” And that would be the extent of the conversation.

She won’t tell you about his midnight jaunts when he leaves the house to go to one of his ‘side jobs.’ He often worked two and three jobs at a time while Mom took care of their five children.

She won’t detail for you how he claims someone, somehow was in their house and stole a very specific amount of money from his wallet, when in reality he simply hid it and forgot where. She also won’t tell you that the huge hole in the ceiling is because he tried to fix something and eventually decided the fix wasn’t needed after all. She won’t tell you how sad she is to see him do these strange and uncharacteristic things.

This is not her Frank.

We have tried to convince Mom and Dad to consider alternative living arrangements, considering their safety and well-being. But Dad won’t budge. I understand. He knows his own home and in that, there is his personal sense of security.

When I’m with him and realize he’s ‘gone off’ into another time and place, talking about what he did and who he was with and the conversation that happened as if it were present time, I just ‘go with it,’ hanging on to every word he shares. For me, he’s giving me a glimpse in to his past, like a family history lesson.

My siblings-in-law have a different perspective than I do with this inevitable progression of dementia. I understand that, too. They are missing their Daddy, the bear of man who hugged you and then kissed both of your cheeks, with a “Mmmmm. Love ya!”

They are missing the everyday things that defined their Daddy. They miss his velvet voice singing Italian lullabies and Frank Sinatra love songs, him strumming his ukulele while sipping his homemade red wine in the kitchen. They miss the pet names he had for them, like, Rags or Moose or Murph. Because he doesn’t remember.

Most of my understanding is with Mom.

My sainted mother-in-law is torn between preserving her husband’s dignity and the emotional exhaustion of his episodes, which sometimes relive a time she’d rather not. This is not the same man who pursued her in their dating days . . .  and yet he is, during tiny moments here and there.

Maybe those moments sustain her to make every day as ordinary as possible for both of them. She does this with extraordinary strength and grace, love and tenderness. She is his wife and she loves him.

As I watch her care for him, I hear a whisper that love is bigger than shared memories. That even when we forget who we are or lose our way, we are yet loved and valued. That even when, piece by piece, we are losing who we have been, we are still precious to the ones who love us. And to the One who loved us before we knew who we were and loves us through and beyond the day we might forget altogether.

mike and Joanne prom
Joanne and one of her five grandchildren, Mikey

Joanne Costantino is a Philly girl and “cafeteria Catholic” laywoman living in the wild suburbs of South Jersey, where she still pines for city life. She graduated from college in 2008, two weeks shy of the birth of her 4th grandchild and now there are five grands. The “accidental matriarch” of a life she didn’t sign up for, Joanne chronicles that life at www.weneedmoresundaydinners.blogspot.com. We do indeed need more Sunday dinners.