October Surprise

Ghosts, witches, and resilience.

Amid Life is a weekly newsletter about reinvention and resilience. I publish stories about making and managing change, prompts to help you write your next chapter, and monthly round-ups like this one. Thanks for reading!

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My first published essay appeared in Stonecoast Review, Issue No. 13,  in the fall of 2020. The issue's theme was superstition.

Thinking I had a shortcut to this week’s newsletter—dropping on Halloween—I reread the piece. It should be a quick copy and paste, right? Maybe some trimming for length. Easy peasy!

If only—

While the scenes included witches, graveyards, and ghosts, the essay wasn't spooky. And, even though I'd titled it Knock Wood, it wasn’t about superstition.

The essay was about resilience—specifically, the source of mine.

So, here's a very, very abridged version of my 2020 essay about supersition resilience.

Knock Wood

On heavy summer afternoons, when oak and maple leaves spun backward in the shifting wind and the sky turned bottle green, my mother, my sister, and I sat on our white clapboard front porch and counted the seconds between thunder clap and lightning flash, "One Mississippi, two Mississippi." When the seconds between rumble and flash shortened, and the rain started in slow splattering drops, I would crawl onto my mother's lap and know I was safe.

Step on a crack, break your mother's back.

We graffitied the concrete sidewalk with chalk-drawn hopscotch courts and took turns jumping one and two-footed up and down the row of numbered squares, careful to stay inside the lines.

It's a silly notion—a kid's game—yet my mother has never broken a bone.

See a penny, pick it up, and all day, you'll have good luck

Mom had a rhyme for everything. She counted the buttons on our sweaters and coats, tapping each one as she went, "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief—" The final button's occupation predicted our future husband. When the rhyme ended with buttons to spare, she sometimes continued with the armed services: sailor, marine, soldier. And sometimes she shrugged, "spinster," as if to let us know marriage was not our only option.

Hold your breath when you pass a cemetery

My mother insists she doesn't want a funeral, but I can't imagine not gathering to grieve.

"You'll be dead," I tease, "how will you know?"

"I'll come back and haunt you," she replies.

I don't doubt it. My mother was born on October 31, and Halloween is her favorite holiday. Several years ago, we visited Salem, Massachusetts, site of the infamous witch trials. Cobwebs draped from every streetlamp and from somewhere unknown, a spooky soundtrack of howls and moans played on a loop.

For a moment, I lost Mom in the crowd and worried about her stumbling on the crooked cobblestone streets. When I spotted her, she was at the center of a coven of women wearing long black robes and bedazzled witch hats.

She was beaming.

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning

In 2019, Mom and I flew to Washington, D.C. to see the cherry blossoms. We watched the skies darken all morning—the forecast calling for thunderstorms. On board the small commuter jet and bracing for turbulence, I remembered learning that the first two minutes after take-off were the most dangerous. If I could count to 120, we'd be fine.

As we taxied, I asked Mom if she remembered those afternoons we watched thunderstorms on the front porch.

"Oh yes," she said. "I was terrified, but I didn’t want my girls to be afraid of anything.”

She reached over and held my hand. While the airplane bounced and bullied its way through the clouds, I closed my eyes and began to count, "One Mississippi, two Mississippi."

Women are hard-wired for resilience—we bend rather than break. We grow stronger with every generation, learning to overcome hardships by working, fighting, and thriving through them.

Resilience is how we become who we are. It is both hard-won and generational. It’s feminine evolution.

I can be brave when I’m terrified, because my mother showed me how.

Last Halloween, Mom and I celebrated her birthday by taking a long walk in the late October sun—her steps nearly as quick as her mind. Perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention because two days later, she broke her hip.

She'll be peeved that I shared her age and her setback, so I'll offer this evidence (and tribute) to her resilience and tenacious joie de vivre: She danced with her grandson (my son) at his wedding—only ten months later. And here we are this year, embarking on a scenic train ride to celebrate her 89th birthday.

Wish Bea a HAPPY BIRTHDAY in the comments!

Substackers Writing About Resilience

Webster’s defines resilience as "an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change." That's an oversimplification at best—a problematic expectation at worst. Resilience isn't easy.

These women writers are a testimony to resilience:

• If when you think of resilience, you think of strength, Raju Tai, author of Creative Resilience, begs to disagree. "Your sensitivity is your superpower," she writes.

• Alexa Wilding's Substack is aptly named Resilience with Alexa Wilding.  She "writes about how and why we keep going," and she can tell a heck of a resilience story that includes Tillie Olsen, beautiful music, and chicken purses.

• This month, my dear friend and brave writer

  Paulla Rich Estes (she/her)
  kicked off a guest post series where I invite women to write about a moment when everything changed. Paulla is writing a trauma memoir —as she puts it, digging "for feelings I had once prayed that I'd never have to feel." Talk about resilience!

• "We also have to develop a resilience that is only achievable through our connection to each other," writes

  Anne Helen Petersen
  . I love Culture Study for its topical subjects, researched essays, and so much connection to the people and times in which we live. This interview with the author of The Resilience Myth, Soraya Chemaly, totally debunked my hearty New Englander independent, suck-it-up version of resilience.—for the better.

Thanks for reading. To those of you who celebrate, Happy Halloween 🎃

Work hard. Be Brave. Believe.

Catherine