This younger Lisa learned to navigate complicated family systems of brothers and their wives, cousins, a rigidly religious sister, and the prospects of graduate education--all of which required her to develop a highly cautious genuine voice with the men in her life. Most of the men in my life know me as a woman unafraid to speak her mind, which is visibly defensible to believe. It’s probably even true. Except when it’s not.
Countless are the times when I decide it’s not worth my energy to confront or contradict the intellectual flow of a man ostensibly in conversation with me, but mostly with himself. My father and my husband, most often here, but I’m a theologian in higher ed environments largely shaped by men, or women behaving like men. I think this discernment and reticence to jump into masculine-intellectual flows was honed by this younger-Lisa, gradschool Lisa. Conversations I loved most, or even gracious dialogues, were less the point than a choreographed skirmish of argument points, wits, or referenced knowledge. Academic discourse, as I learned from sparring with my father and his brothers, is not about relationship as much as knowledge, or being in the Know. Folks will want to relate to you if you are the knowing one. Today, I rarely enter into these kinds of interactions, having learned my relational energies and feelings are best spent elsewhere.
Except recently, which was a surprise to all involved...a surprise that feels connected and congruent somehow with this welcoming of younger-Lisa back home to my inner table.
Brian and I were on a walk in the preserve a couple weeks ago, like we’ve been blessed to enjoy for many months of this pandemic pause season. It was late afternoon, the sun was thinking about setting into a luscious, mauve sky. The ground felt good beneath our feet and Nala had already pounced at something at least twice, sadly (for her, not for us) coming up with nothing in her jaws. Then Brian began down a path I’ve come to sense as his own emotional venting or when I’m feeling less charitable, intellectual masturbation. My part is traditionally to nod and cheer him on, both of us hoping for his quick release. But something in me snapped this time. No longer could I let his preference for what he calls ‘European civilization’ and the ‘classical tradition’ stand idly by while the planet and women and children got silenced.
Credit where credit is due, I didn’t lash out like I’ve done in these recent years past. I began carefully, with a measured rage. “I cannot go here with you anymore, m’dear,” I said quietly. “What I need to say now I simply need to say. It requires nothing of you. But I am continually stunned at how arrogant we are about a so-called ‘civilization’ that excludes at least half of the world’s population, brazenly murders another portion of the population, and then calls itself ‘civilization.’” I paused with the space that was opening up within me, filling with fire but also water too. “Where does this fascination with the classical tradition come from, still, knowing all we know today? Why does it still beckon so very fucking many of us?” The f-bomb was my gift to him, because he knows I only drop it when I’m stretched taut and about to let go, should he push.
He began to rise to the fire, like he does. He spoke from his own pain of never being able to say the right thing or be the right way in any conversation where social justice arises. I stopped us walking and waited for him to realize it. He stopped, confused but quieting. “There is nothing for you to do with my words, Brian, but hear them,” I said quietly. “I said them for me. I require nothing of you but to simply allow the words to exist here between us, legitimate, acceptable to you, valid as they are. I will not argue with you about this, nor will I participate in this conversation anymore. I need you to hear me and say nothing.” I didn’t even look at his face to see if anything registered, but simply started walking again.
We walked on in silence, Nala pausing every once in a while to look over her shoulder, insuring we were still coming behind her. I noticed the sunset again, a deeper mauve even than it was before. “Cloud color sure is nice,” I whispered aloud. He murmured agreement. We walked home in what was for me a companionable silence. I felt spacious, free, energized, surprised. I don’t know how Brian felt. I didn’t ask, nor did I feel the need to.
Older me offered younger me something unexpected here, something new. Not only did I refuse to participate in the pretense of a conversation, which was really my beloved working out his own feelings of inadequacy and guilt, projected outward. One could argue I mirrored to him what he was doing with me. Granted, it was a conscious move on my part, to respond consciously instead of shut down or react defensively. I informed him the words he would hear were for me, that I was going to speak and that he had no responsibility for them, nor was it a debate or ‘conversation.’ He simply had opportunity to hear, to receive. I needed nothing from him, even then. If he chose not to hear, it didn’t matter for my immediate needs of speaking for me. So the second gift of learning here was that I spoke for me. I spoke what I needed to say aloud. What I needed to refuse in him or his choices. Lastly, I tended to what I needed in an intellectual-flow with a man in my life, irregardless of how he might feel about it. This is much harder for me to do than most folks in my life imagine it is, for whatever reasons.
Younger me had opportunity to get a little freer from the overwhelming presence of Authority in her worlds of intellect and ‘conversation.’ I was grounded in what we knew--she and I--and didn’t care to be beholden to the classical presuppositions any longer.
I have to imagine she smiled inside me. I certainly did.
