chapter five

Possibility

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience”

Emily Dickinson

Becoming Beautiful, and Other Transformations

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance; I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

When I was in middle school, my mom converted the utility room of our brick, ranch-style house into a beauty salon. Her name is Lillian, so she called it “The Lily Pad.” All during my teen years, I would come home from cheerleading practice and rummage in the fridge to a lively background soundtrack coming from behind the utility room door: the chatter and laughter that is unique to the beauty salon.

It’s the sound of women becoming beautiful, or at least believing in that moment that they are; the sound of hope, encouragement, and validation—of women helping one another feel good about themselves. My mom is great at it. While she was skilled at cutting, coloring, and styling hair, she is exceptionally talented at making women feel hopeful, positive, and valued. Which is probably why, throughout my entire life, whenever I’ve met someone who knows her, they nearly always exclaim, “Oh, I love your mother!”

The home beauty salon was important to my mom: She wanted to be there when I came in from school, but she also wanted to earn income, define her schedule, and have something all her own. While she enjoyed the convenience of the home business, she always dreamed of something more, her own freestanding salon, with an atmosphere that was lovely and spa-like.

When I was twenty-five, I was living in Atlanta and working as Manager of Marketing Communications for a major telecommunications company. I remember coming home from work one day and shuffling through the mail as I stood in the sunny, weedy front yard of my funky little white frame house on Lindbergh Drive in Peachtree Hills. Ripping open a letter from my mother, a photo fluttered to the grass. It was a picture of Mom, smile beaming, standing in front of her new salon. Her arm rested on a wooden signpost that read “Ashby & Company” in elegant script. On the back of the picture she had written, “Me and My Dream.”

At that time, my mother was about fifty, my age now. Her youngest child was long gone from the nest, living in another city six hours away. My mom had been married at only eighteen, and became a mother just a year later. Having devoted her life to children and family, she was ready to expand her possibilities, her sense of who she was.

I remember how excited she was about opening her own salon, how energized and animated her voice became as she told me about it. She was starting a new business, taking a risk, and she couldn’t quite believe she was actually doing it. At the time, while I listened politely and told her I was proud of her and said all the right things, I know I was really waiting for her to stop talking and return to the most pressing and important subject in both of our lives: me.

Like many people in their twenties, I was utterly self-centered. To be honest, I was probably worse than most. I was the center of my own sparkling universe. Having grown up the baby of the family by five years and the only daughter, I occupied that rarified echelon of the family princess. (Of course my brothers were so rowdy growing up that my parents just seemed grateful that I wasn’t breaking lamps while wrestling in the family room.) I was praised and indulged a lot as a child—and I loved it! But I’ll admit to being more than a bit insensitive in my teens and twenties. And at twenty-five, while independent and successful by most standards, I still had a lot of growing up to do as a human being.

But that day, reading the words “Me and My Dream” in my mother’s handwriting, seeing the hopefulness in her eyes, I could feel what her salon meant to her, and how important her achievement was. I ran in the house, screen door slamming, to call my mom, excited for once not to talk about my career, my dramatic love life, my travel plans—but about Lillian Ashby, and how proud I was to be her daughter.

Evolving

Meg is my analytical friend; whip smart with a wicked dry wit. She began her thirty year career with IBM as an intern our senior year at Rhodes, when we were suitemates in Voohries Dorm. We named our suite The Cave, and painted the shared private hallway with all manner of colorful graffiti—phrases, inside jokes, artistic doodles—whatever we were experiencing that year became part of our “mural.”

Meg earned a Business degree and I majored in English, so we didn’t have many classes together in our college careers. But that final autumn semester we did happen to have one, a history class in which the professor loved to jab the air with his fingers and ask rhetorical questions with a passion we found hilarious. I can’t recall the context (if there was one), but one afternoon the loudly repeated question was “Just what have you evolved into?”

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

Anaïs Nin, Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.4

Returning to our suite that evening, I found that Meg had painted, in giant red letters, “Just WHAT Have You Evolved Into?” across the very top of our wall. It became our catchphrase for the year, the utility response to achievement and failing alike, usually delivered in a wry voice with a raised eyebrow. Stayed out late and skipped class? As you slunk into the bathroom to brush your teeth at noon, you might hear that question mockingly raised from Meg’s room.

Meg, of course, never skipped class. She was already keeping lots of plates spinning and doing it exceedingly well. She carried a full load of classes her senior year while working twenty hours a week for IBM, doing such excellent work that she had a job offer in hand a month before graduation.

This is not to say she didn’t make some missteps in her “evolution.” One of my favorite memories involves Meg’s discovery of a lipstick that purported to “blend with your body’s chemistry once applied, magically transforming into the perfect shade to flatter your own unique skin tone!”

In the tube, it was a sickly green, but once swiped onto the lips— voila!—your ideal, most flattering shade! For some reason, Meg found this concept fascinating and couldn’t wait to try it out.

She bounded into our suite late one Friday afternoon, IBM binders under both arms, ready for a quick change from her ’80s shoulder-padded power suit into some stirrup pants and a shoulder-padded, geometric print tunic sweater for a big night out. “Where are we going?” she called, yanking the sweater over her head. As I caught sight of her face emerging from the neckline, my jaw dropped.

Her lips were a slick purplish red, not exactly flattering on my blonde, fair-skinned friend. She flashed me a garish purple grin. “Don’t you love this new lipstick? So cool—it mixes with my body’s pH for the perfect shade. Want to try it, Kel?”

It was one of those friendship tests that I failed. She seemed so happy with her new lipstick purchase, in such a great Friday night mood, that I couldn’t bear to reveal my true opinion. And so…I let her go out that night looking like she had just eaten a grape Popsicle with no hands.

Mistakes were made, fortunately mostly in this minor category, during our evolution that year. But as I look back, they are the memories that bring the biggest smiles.

After graduation, Meg and Kathleen backpacked together through Europe, and then Meg moved to Arkansas to begin her career with IBM. I moved to Atlanta to pursue my own career, missing my friend and often wishing that she and I were working in the same city, so we could meet for dinner and I could get her advice on cutting my marketing budget, if not choosing my lipstick shade!

Today, she is Director of Mergers and Acquisitions for IBM’s Software Group. She has worldwide responsibility for the successful integration of newly acquired software companies into IBM. This position followed a long career in Sales Management and Business Operations. Her various positions at IBM have taken her all over the world in pursuit of new opportunities.

Married to a fellow IBMer and the mother of two sons, Meg has an energy, an ambition and a level of accomplishment that I have always admired. She is not afraid to take on the big things, to be the leader, with all its attendant risk and responsibility. A problem solver in both life and work, she does it all with a wry, irresistible sense of humor.

The following story about her mother, Mary Waters, reveals the many facets of the woman who was my friend’s first, best example of a woman’s ability to fulfill all of her aspirations: personal, family and career.

According to Meg, “As we both get older, Mom continues to inspire me with how she never stops seeking, learning, and expressing herself through her poetry, writing, and spirituality. I love her sense of humor about life and all of its stages—in one of her essays she describes herself as ‘being in her coffee and dessert years—rapidly approaching the after-dinner mints!’ To me, whatever stage we are in, it’s still sweet.”

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Unexpected Doors

Meg’s Story

There are some moments you don’t forget. This one happened seventeen years ago in an ordinary California grocery store, as my mother and I shopped together and my three-year-old son, Alex, sat in the grocery cart. I remember how happy I was to have Mom visiting from Little Rock, and how much I was looking forward to a wonderful week of just being with her. We were talking and laughing nonstop as we loaded the cart with celebratory foods—plenty of hors d’oeuvres and white wine along with the ingredients for the special dishes that she always prepared on her visits. Alex was starting to get fussy, which meant he was receiving a ready and flowing supply of goldfish crackers to keep him occupied.

As we were nearly finished with our shopping, the dam burst. No amount of goldfish or cajoling could keep Alex quiet. He began releasing torrential screams that caused everyone in the store to stop to witness what kind of abuse this child must be suffering. When he went into a full-scale tantrum (of Richter measure), the only way out was to abandon the cart full of groceries and run for the exit.

So many times before, I had eschewed those meltdowns; all kids have them, right? But there was nothing typical about that tantrum (nor all the ones that had come before it). Nor was his lack of speech typical, or his lack of eye contact or his toe walking. I ignored so many signs due to fear of the unknown. But there he was, white-knuckling the cart and convulsing his small body, trying to overturn it and all of its contents, screaming at the top of his lungs. There was my beautiful boy with his white-blonde hair and blue eyes, who looked so much like me, so much like mom, my firstborn, the love of my life.

Deep down, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to know, so I kept it buried. I hoped he’d outgrow it. But now Mom was there and I was standing in the grocery store staring at a gallon of melting ice cream and three bottles of really good buttery, oaky Chardonnay, and none of that was going to matter in a few moments because Alex was about to show me and my mother something that I did not want to see.

As I clutched my screaming son in my arms and ran from the overfilled cart, I was hit with a wave of emotion. First, I was angry at Alex for his horrific and embarrassing meltdown, not only in public but in front of my mom (proving me a bad mother). But mostly, I was afraid. I suddenly saw Alex’s tantrum through Mom’s eyes, and I was scared to death of what might be “wrong” with my child.

When we were home and had settled Alex, Mom looked at me calmly and gave voice to the words I had kept silent. “Meg, this is not normal,” she said, with stern emphasis on the NOT. “Something is wrong.” As I sat huddled in my despair on the couch, Mom consulted a child development book from my bookshelf. I remember the book had a very small reference box with a list of the top ten signs of autism…of which I counted, my son had eight.

I am grateful that, in that frightening moment of recognition and acceptance, my mom was by my side. I held tightly to the lifeline of her voice, her calm, steady reassurance that Alex would be OK, that I had a son who was going to need a lot of help, but that it would get better. He would get better.

“One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that people never know about.”

Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

As any parent who has received an autism diagnosis knows, it is heartbreaking. You have to remind yourself to breathe, because it feels like all the oxygen has been drawn from the room. The happy future you had pictured for your child becomes a dark and confusing blur. As I sat with my acceptance, I saw doorways of possibility closing, one by one. I remember feeling profoundly sad, unlike any sadness I had ever endured.

My mom knew of this sadness, and understood it. During her career as a speech therapist, she had worked with many children with developmental disabilities. She counseled parents who had received crushing diagnoses for their beautiful children. She worked with teenagers who came from home environments fraught with abuse and neglect. She herself knew sadness, as the only child of parents who were substance abusers.

My mom was born in a small Wisconsin town on November 16, 1935, nestled between her father’s birthday on November 15 and her mother’s on November 17. Her dad was the town doctor, and her mother was a nurse. While her parents loved her, they struggled with raising a child. Their addictions made them haphazard parents and she learned from an early age that they were not to be relied upon. Often she would be left to wait alone for hours as her mother or father would simply forget to pick her up.

Her childhood memories are tainted with feelings of loneliness and abandonment. As a small girl, she turned to books for comfort and escape, becoming a voracious reader and writer of stories. Left alone much of the time, she liked to create stories about her sole companions, a trio of unconventional pets: Hopalong, a one-legged chicken; Peanuts, the tame squirrel; and Scampie, a deodorized skunk. She also liked to write about the colorful characters that were friends and patients of her father’s. She once wrote a poem that began, “I knew the small town secrets which my father knew.”

From childhood, she learned to peer below the surface of things, one reason I think that she has always possessed such extraordinary insight about people and events. Books, her earliest and truest friends, are a passion held constant all her life, and reading and creating stories are among the ways she mothered me best. I treasure the lifetime of books she has given me and poems she has written for me.

Mom grew up without many rules and the few rules she was given, she made a habit of breaking. This defiant aspect to her personality did not serve her well when her parents sent her to a Catholic boarding school in Minnesota. The nuns kept a close eye on Mom and confined her to campus on a regular basis given her penchant for noncompliance. There was one nun, Sister Timothy, who “got her” and turned out to be one of Mom’s greatest influences; they remained lifelong friends until Sister Timothy’s death a few years ago.

At Marquette University, Mom majored in speech pathology and met my father Bill. She remembers her college years fondly, an opportunity to spread her wings without the stifling supervision she experienced in boarding school. Her marriage was a bit of a shock to her system. She was an only child marrying a man with six siblings.

In 1957, she started her career as a speech pathologist at four local elementary schools in Virginia. One of the schools was Sojourner Truth, where she was the only white person at the school, but she never felt like an outsider, and remembers it as being her favorite. That teaching experience was the beginning of what was to be an adult life committed to working on diversity.

A move back to Milwaukee in 1959 was met with an offer to write and deliver a live television show called Speech Time. She knew nothing about scripting a program or appearing on TV, but she didn’t let on. Despite being a young mother in the 1950s, she saw the opportunity and seized it with both hands.

She spent a fair amount of her career known as “Miss Mary”, appearing on two live television shows dedicated to helping children with their speech sounds. She became pregnant twice during her show’s tenure, and the TV station sat her behind a desk since it was considered “inappropriate” for a pregnant woman to appear on TV. Given her rule-breaking nature, she rallied against such nonsensical notions and found every opportunity to show off her growing pregnant belly!

Throughout my childhood, Mom immersed herself in a myriad of jobs and projects. Her boundless energy for new endeavors amazed us all. Patience was not always her strong suit, however, and as my brother Tim describes it, Mom always wants to solve problems in real time rather than due time.

Her desire to help others led her to work with disadvantaged youth, traveling the state to speak out on the subject of drug and alcohol abuse. This mission was borne from her own experience with her parents. Mom also actively worked on the subject of diversity, facilitating weekend workshops for teens and business leaders alike.

She saw potential in those who hardly knew they had it, such as a young African American student named Roosevelt Thompson, whom she profiled in an award-winning PBS documentary entitled As We See It. Roosevelt was a charismatic young man who had the ability to defuse racial tensions at Central High School during the turbulent seventies.

Mom saw in Roosevelt Thompson all the possibilities of a changing world. When his life was tragically cut short in an auto accident just after he received the Rhodes Scholarship in his senior year at Yale, my mother mourned his death as if she had lost one of her own children. To her and so many others, he represented the hope of an entire generation of students at Central High School.

Roosevelt’s ability to get people to talk honestly about difficult subjects continued to inspire my Mom as she prepared for her “second act” when I left for college. Forever reinventing herself, she went back to school at age forty-five for her Masters in Interpersonal Communications. She used those skills to lead conversations with business, school, and civic groups on a host of topics, many of them uncomfortable. Sex, substance abuse, racial issues—nothing was ever taboo with Mom. She is not frightened to face what is difficult, what makes us anxious and afraid.

And so that day in the grocery store, she put a name to that which I was terrified to label. I’ll never forget the balm of those simple, beautiful words, “It will be OK. He will be ok.” Just as she perceived Roosevelt Thompson’s talent decades before, my mother intuited Alex’s potential.

After Alex’s formal diagnosis, Mom was steadfast in her support. I am sure she sometimes felt helpless in the face of my urgent pursuit of so many treatment options, but she did not judge (at least in my presence) our un-charted plan. She was always there as a willing listener to share my burden. She talked to her physician friends, sent me articles, and shared many spiritual books to help me through. But most of all, she wrote me beautiful poems, words that usually arrived just when I needed them most. This one, called simply “Alex,” was written when my son was in grade school.

Alex, little golden boy,

how hard it is for us

to understand

that part of you

that lives in shadows.

But darkness can nourish

as well as light,

and as you begin to emerge,

you will carry the strength of the shadow,

and it will serve you well.

We have lessons to learn

from you;

far greater, I think,

than those you will learn

from us.

Her unbridled support and encouraging words carried us through some dark moments as my husband and I worked to assemble the best set of services possible to help our son. Some treatments have been more successful than others, but none of them a cure. Because there is no cure for autism. But my mother was right. Alex is OK. His life hasn’t been easy, but just as she predicted, things did get better.

His life may be different from what I had once imagined for him, but Alex is growing, learning, and working to fulfill his potential. As a senior in high school, he was asked to record a video to help students at his high school understand the consequences of bullying and his autism. In the video, my son, who once could barely make eye contact, is standing tall and looking steadily into the camera, saying, “I was bullied. I felt left out. They ignored me and made me feel bad. But then my mom came in and talked to the class about my disability and things got better.”

When I saw that footage for the first time, I thought my heart would burst with love and joy. Of course, no one was more proud than Mom. Alex is indeed her grandchild, bravely standing up, sharing his story, and speaking for those who could not do so for themselves. That’s quite a legacy.

Mom has cheered Alex’s hard-won progress through the years as he has become more and more independent. She recently wrote him a beautiful letter of support on his twentieth birthday. In it, she wrote, “Your path has not been an easy one we know, but you have walked it with grace, love and kindness. Alex, you have become a fine young man, and we will continue to enjoy watching your life unfold, as you aim for the stars, one by one, day by day, and reach them.”

When our son John was born, Mom built a special relationship with him as well. Through their playful exchange of loving insults, I see my own relationship with my mom being reinvented. John is a good writer like his Grandma. I hope all the “left brains” in our family don’t squash this special talent of his. He also has a deep compassionate streak that was likely inherited from her as well.

Mom encourages my sons in their every endeavor, just as she encouraged me at their age. Whether it was acting in school plays, writing and editing for the school newspaper, cheerleading, attending cotillion, practicing gymnastics, holding class office or leading church retreats, she was a staunch supporter. I think she knew that I liked to keep a lot of plates spinning, much as she had. Mom always let me make my own decisions, but I would blame her for the bad ones anyway!

Her words of support are reflected in her poem to me titled “Megrit” written soon after Alex’s diagnosis.

When you feel sad,

powerless,

overwhelmed,

and yet are able

to rise above

or circumvent

those feelings,

and act to change

the situation,

the soul takes note.

And, in time,

help will come,

and strength, and peace.

One day,

You will realize

that you have been

forever changed,

and that you have grown up,

not merely grown old.

Since her retirement, my tireless mother has written five books of poetry and essays, the creative expression of over thirty-five years of exploring her spirituality and seeking to understand life’s greater purpose. In the first, Sandpaper Blankets, she inscribed, “To Meg – my daughter and friend – the first person to call me ‘poet.’ ” I liked that.

Having a freethinking, truth-speaking poet for a mother is not always easy, but whenever there is news, good or bad, the first phone call I make is to her. I know on the other end of the line will be a loving, encouraging voice poised to listen like no other, the voice of my mother. My sister Kathie describes those phone calls as “talking each other to a better place, where we all take turns on the ledge.” When it is my turn, I am grateful that she is holding the line.