Activist♥Editor
let's connect!

Introductions (3/5)

8/18/2019

0 Comments

 
previous | next

Picture
~ Anna ~

My mother and I have spent a lot of time over the years reflecting on our differences — the ways we each felt different from mainstream culture. Lately, we have spent more time also thinking about and telling stories about how we are the same as many culturally dominant groups. We have been able to talk with each other in this way between us. We have gotten committed to telling the story of the range of privileged and oppressed spaces we occupy collectively. 

It gets murky fast, and overly conceptual. My tendency is to go high up in the clouds. I keep committing to the process. 

It feels necessary.

Necessary because my story and my history are in a way my mother’s story and history, and this is where I go frequently to look for myself and to find self-understanding. I start somewhere with her, and the creative process of my life was first created literally inside her and also through her love. When I create my story by telling it, I am telling a story that she also had a hand in creating, and this magical space of creation across generations is part of our shared history. That’s why my mother’s story and the way she gives it to me freely and openly continue to feed my creative life and the ways I choose to see and express who I am in the wider context of society.

Necessary, also, because the stories we’ve told to each other about ourselves over the years are always changing. As illustrator Leah Pearlman writes, honesty is the only thing that can keep up with change. Here’s a little honesty about my younger self and how I have held and defined my mother in the past. In my early twenties, I began writing about my family for various graduate school writing projects. I sense that I was not as good at honesty back then, and I’m still working on opening the door to my whole truth. But now I’m stalling. Let me get back to the honest part. This is how I described my mother in the opening paragraph of one essay:

When my mother was three years old she ran through a muddy field and came home with polio. I like to imagine her this way, 1945, rural Norway, north of the arctic circle, a three-year-old child with ridiculously dark brown hair running fast, as fast as her baby legs can carry her — alone — through a field of heather and cloudberries. Coming closer I can almost see the polio fairy dust jump up out of the ground and sting her bare feet. She winces in pain. Her right leg goes limp. At the same time I see that she is no longer a child. Turning fast into an adult, her leg has stopped growing with the rest of her. She pauses in the field for a moment while a large metal brace wraps and buckles around the short leg. But she doesn’t stop for long. She moves forward again, walking now on crutches. Too slow! She pushes forward in a manual wheelchair. Still, too slow. Finally, she surges toward me in a battery-powered chair. I like thinking of my mother as a crippled Norwegian goddess descending from the far north, hitching herself to a star, and crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a winged chariot of metal to find my father in small town Ohio. 

Necessary, also, because today I am trying again to see more of my mother, to not obfuscate her with my daydreams.

My mother’s names have been Karen Magnhild Nygaard, Karen Nygaard Hirsch, and Karen Hagrup. She was born in 1942. She was born in Norway and immigrated to the United States. She’s white. She’s a cis woman and uses she pronouns. She’s a twin. She is one of four sisters. She is lovingly partnered for many years to a woman, after a long marriage with a man. She says now that she must be bisexual. She got polio when she was three, has grappled with years of post polio syndrome, and in her older years is navigating wet macular degeneration in both of her eyes. She has herpes and a thyroid imbalance. She has been taking Wellbutrin for over a decade. She is retired and lives frugally on what she has. She has been a teacher, a professor, an executive director, and a founder. She is a writer and an artist. She hates violence in movies. And she loves color and lights. 

All of these parts of her have beginnings that lead to longer stories. And all of these parts of her have been the perfect mishmash all together to feel like she has not just been marginal to society, pushed out of the center, but that instead she comes from somewhere completely other — somewhere beyond the margin. 

For at least a couple of reasons, my mother imagined herself living off the edge of the world well into her twenties. When she was a child she traveled with her father to a Norwegian island called Skorpa where one family lived so that her father could minister to that family. Skorpa means crust. Traveling through stormy, isolated landscapes like these was common in my mother’s childhood. She grew up believing that Norway wasn’t totally part of the world, that the action must be other places. Some of the visits with her father included showing his daughter and her polio leg off to adherents as testimony of god’s power and mercy. She sensed for many years that her parents already imagined her residing in paradise, not fit for life on earth. Growing up, my mother didn’t have the language of marginalization or an identity as being part of a minority group, something that would put her somewhere on the map, if only at the outskirts. As a little girl my mother understood her place in the world as somewhere not totally in the world. 

But my mother very much lived on earth.

At age twenty-seven she decided to leave the crust of the world behind her. After many years receiving messages that her life belonged to her parents and to god, Karen crossed an ocean, got married, raised two children, and had a prolific career. In the eighties and nineties, my mother was one of the first people to tell the world that disability is a cultural and political experience, not just a medical one. 

Today she often still feels that her voice and contribution has already been forgotten in the wider disability culture. She has a doctorate, offered her own life toward winning through settlement an early legal case under the Americans with Disabilities Act, has met Barack Obama three times in the course of helping him get elected twice, and still often feels unaccomplished. My mother is a female disabled immigrant whose writing hasn’t been published nearly enough, nor as often as my father’s writing has been.

My mother speaks two languages fluently, and sometimes when she opens her mouth she feels like she can’t say anything anyone will understand. She is really good at laughing at herself at times like these, and her own shy but resilient sense of humor, teetering between despair and joy, has certainly saved her and her nervous system from collapse for decades. 

My mother knows things about being outside the in crowd. She knows what it’s like to work incredibly hard to get people to pay attention to you and often have the attention she can get turn into pity or scorn or revulsion. She knows what it’s like to internalize that kind of hurtful attention and end up working hard to hide yourself from others, from the world, from your own self-love.

She knows the unique challenge of trying to make it from the edge of the world into the margins of society. There is a language piece here, and a social and cultural piece, as well. Margin and marginalization were words and concepts that my mother got when she learned English and moved to the United States in her late twenties. She did have access to many advantages and centering experiences as a white European Christian with financial stability, including accessing the Independent Living Movement and other disability rights communities in the United States, which gave her a political and personal context to flourish, to become conscious of her marginalization as a disabled person, and of her privilege as well. Even with all of this access and with all the talk of centering her experience, my mother knows that she may never actually get to the center. The center was not built for her. Frankly, it’s no longer where she wants to be anyway.

Still, my mother asked me to help tell the world the story of her life. She asked me to use my privilege to help center her. I said yes.

I also asked my mother what she thought about the idea of inviting people to meet her in the margin instead. I asked her if there was magic there that people needed to know about, experiences like my Judaism and her disability. I asked her if the margin, after all her years, was a good place. She said yes.

We made each other think. Hard. And a lot.


Introductions (3/5)
previous | next
0 Comments

Introductions (2/5)

8/4/2019

0 Comments

 
previous | next

Picture
"There are lots of different ways that we can become disheartened, distant, and disconnected with parts of our identities." — Anna Hirsch, Mindful Hearts

~ Anna ~

I am a bad singer. We can start there. 

Really. It’s objectively true. Like, really bad. Really, really bad. And I knew it when I was fourteen. 

When I was a baby I was baptized so that my mother’s Lutheran parents in Norway could feel that my soul would be saved. My Jewish grandmother who lived in the United States and who I saw regularly never spoke of this with me. Some time before I turned double digits my sister and I shared a mikveh (ritual purity bath) and we were converted to Judaism. I had my bat mitzvah (coming of age ritual) on the late side — around the age of fourteen. As I remember it, we drove two hours every weekend to the closest synagogue where there were seemingly endless painful sessions with a teacher trying to teach me to sing my haftarah (Prophets) reading in Hebrew for the occasion. 

This is the beginning of the story of Anna’s bad singing and bad memory for her bat mitzvah. 

No, this is the beginning of the story of Anna’s identity as a Jew and as part of a marginalized group. 

No, wait, it must be even bigger than that — this is the beginning of the story of Anna’s consciousness of power, and of cultural, institutional, and social forces. 

Did I get it right finally? Ok, no, not really. Because, really, this is a beginning of all of these stories. And more.

For one thing, I knew that I couldn’t for the life of me reproduce the notes that the teacher who my parents had hired was committed to making me hear and learn. It literally made no sense to me. I think I went home crying after one of those lessons. Finally, I was transferred to work directly with the rabbi. To my surprise, the rabbi didn’t seem to care at all how off my tone was. He just wanted me to memorize the words. He gave me cassette tapes of the reading sung in Hebrew by other rabbis to take with me so I could practice at home in the ease of not traveling to the synagogue with one of my parents or one of their university students to chaperone and in the privacy of my bedroom with no one to critique me. I listened over and over to those cassette tapes trying desperately to memorize a language that I didn’t speak. And when the big day came and I still only had half of my haftarah reading memorized, our rabbi sang the second half for me, smiling the whole time and reassuring me that it was a rather long portion compared to most.

It took me nearly a quarter of a century to understand that “Anna the bad singer with a bad memory” is probably not the whole story here. But I think I am finally figuring that out. When I look back now I can see more of what was going on. I was growing up Jewish in the nineties in rural Missouri and the closest synagogue to our home was almost two hours away. My earlier and brief Hebrew studies in Chattanooga, Tennessee, had mostly ended at age nine when we moved to what my father has long called “the hub of isolation” and weekday after school Hebrew classes were no longer available. In this new life in a small town, there were no other kids my age around who I could easily and regularly talk to about being Jewish or about trying to learn Hebrew. My sister also had her bat mitzvah in Missouri, but it was much sooner after we had moved there. I was five years into living in this setting when I finally succeeded at having a bat mitzvah and a lot had happened to me.

In choir class at our only public elementary school it felt like we spent most of the fall every year singing Christmas songs. When I got the feeling that my choir teacher was glad that I didn’t know the words by heart and sometimes just mouthed along without making sounds, I took it as a sign that she was relieved because I was bad at singing. I held onto that story for years. Looking back from my late thirties, I can see now that what I was feeling might also have had something to do with shame for not being part of the right cultural background to fit in. Yes, I was also a bad singer even in elementary school and I probably felt some shame about that, too. It’s just all true. 


Had I lived somewhere else with more Jews some version of this would still have happened to me. In fact, years later it did. On meeting an orthodox Jew in graduate school in Louisiana and coming to her house for Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner one Friday evening, midway through a conversation about Judaism she blurted, “Oh, so you’re Jewish in the wrong way!”

You see I learned how to see all of these parts of myself, to include all of my story and speak openly about myself and my background, from my mother — a woman who was raised Lutheran. And where is Judaism supposed to come from? Your mom. Well, your mom’s blood, to be exact. But that is exactly where my Judaism did come from — my mom. My disabled mother knew it in her blood and in her bones that it was important to raise her children Jewish along with my Jewish father. She knew that being Jewish would give us access to an identity experience that could be critical for our developing empathy for other experiences of oppression and for our adopting a commitment to restorative justice. And had I been able then to respond to that dinner party comment in any other way than laugh nervously, I would like to have said that I’m a bad singer who has grown fond of singing Christmas songs and still likes to sing bits of Jewish prayers and really loves being a Jew raised by an atheistic Lutheran.


If that’s the "wrong way," bring on the wrong. My mother is a badass, and I am fortunate to be her kid.

Because of my mother I had access not just to Jewish identity, but to a complex version of Judaism that inspired bigotry from other Jews and a unique landscape of marginalization, privilege, and passing.

When I look back now, I can also see that standing in that elementary school choir class I could pretend for the most part that I was just like the other kids. My singing might have been off key, but I didn’t have a different way of speaking, such as a linguistic accent or dialect or the kind of noticeable inflection or vocalization that can come with some disabilities. I didn’t have a different rate of reading and saying words. I can see now some of the ways that I hung out in the safety of these normative social markers, avoiding stirring the pot.

I didn’t complain to the music teacher that she should have songs for Jewish kids. I didn’t chat with my fifth-grade friends about our nondisabledness and how to use this status to make things more accessible for disabled kids. I didn’t even make friends with the few kids who did have accents and the kids whose disabilities made their singing different, too. I told myself that I was good for overcoming the ways my differences were bad, by taking pride in them anyway or by hiding them, like not singing and not messing everyone else up. I never really questioned the original idea that my differences were bad. And I neglected to look at all the ways that my sameness kept me away from my own differences and from others' differences.

Introductions (2/5)
​previous | next
0 Comments

    The Project

    An adventure in homegrown oral history making, Meet Me in the Margin takes the reader on a ride through radicalized Norwegian, American, disabled, mentally ill, queer, polyamorous, interfaith, and intergenerational landscapes, weaving together stories of love and transformation between worlds and across psyches.

    Read more . . .


    Read All Chapters...

    Authors

    Karen Hagrup

    ​physical disability
    immigration

    bisexuality

    ​As an anti-Skinnerian educator and mother, a disability studies pioneer, and a staunch Obama supporter, I have spent my life fighting for people's rights and joy, my own included.


    Read more . . .


    Anna
    ​Hirsch

    mental illness
    interfaith

    polyamory

    As a feminist movement writer and as a relationship-focused psychotherapist, 
    I have come to believe deeply in the power of intersectional, intergenerational, joy-focused storytelling as a powerful act of resistance. 

    Read more . . .


    Archives

    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed


    Banner artwork
    ​by Karen Hagrup.
    ​
    ​Copyright all material
     © 2019.
my work

​praise

hire me

blog

Copyright © 2015