Tiny Altars: A Midlife Revival

Tiny Altars: A Midlife Revival

© 2023 by Amy Hallberg

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, by photography, xerography, or by any other means, by broadcast transmission, by translation into any kind of language, nor by recording electronically or otherwise, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 979-8-9879215-0-0 (print), 979-8-9879215-1-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903916

Book design by Paul Nylander | Illustrada Design

Published by Courageous Wordsmith

Minneapolis, Minnesota

www.AmyHallberg.com

For Grandma.

And for my aunt.

Contents

Foreword—Please read

Mentor

Origin

Shiny Objects

Legacy

Pose Questions

Innocent Child

Clarity

Artifacts

Hidden Agendas

Observe Clues

Wild Woman

Peace

Boundaries

Breakdown

Play Freely

Empress Mother

Unity

Paradigm Shift

Heirloom Frames

Simple Steps

Student

Courage

Intersections

Variations on a Theme

Embrace the Detour

Seeker

Acceptance

Sanctuary

Discernment

Trust Yourself

Puppet

Ease

Divine Timing

Margin Notes

Follow Your Feelings

Muse

Freedom

Lessons by Proxy

Shadow Work

Dig Deeper

Fool

Love

Life Review

Liminal Grace

Read the Signs

Witness

Patience

Living Museum

Lacuna

Name It

Advocate

Memory

Spoken Word

Author-ity

ReVision

Translator

Brilliance

Twin Cities

Dearly Beloved

The Veil Grows Thin

Live into Answers

Acknowledgments

Foreword—Please read

In October 2018, I threw a party to launch my first book, a true-life novel called German Awakening: Tales from an American Life. One evening soon after that, I attended a Minneapolis forum for creative entrepreneurs hosted by Minnesota Public Radio.

The featured married couple spoke on stage with a local reporter about the pillars of their business, a performance company run by—and for—artists of color, and how their framework supports the mission of educating, empowering, and connecting people, extending to the wider community.

Enraptured, I sat several rows back in the dimmed auditorium, taking notes at a furious pace, wondering how I might translate that community vision to Courageous Wordsmith, my fledgling life-coach-meets-writing business. I appreciated that here in the Twin Cities, where people who look like me usually stand front and center, they’d created sanctuary space. It was tiring work, I knew, but important.

Somehow, while I was getting up from my chair and making my way to the exit so that I could bypass the reception, a young woman stopped me in the aisle. I saw you taking notes, she said. Do you know the speakers?

I found myself talking with one person and then the next, nibbling a banh-mi sandwich, until suddenly I stood face-to-face with the woman I so admired, who had performed on stages all over the world. I fumbled in my purse and handed her a bookmark with the finches from my German Awakening book cover. I’m an author, I said. I’ve written a memoir about Germany.

She smiled brightly and held my gaze. I’ve worked in Germany too.

Emboldened, I started to spell out what I really wanted to do. I’m writing a second book about parallels between twentieth-century Germany and what’s happening in America now. Sins that were always here, but I just didn’t see them because of how I was raised. As I heard myself say it, I looked away. Except who am I as a white woman, really, to be telling this story?

And then she hit me. I mean, she actually hit me.

Not hard, to be sure, with her open palm, and I had on a down jacket to soften the blow. But she definitely hit me. This slender Black woman with a powerful presence looked me straight in the eyes.

Please tell your story, she said. Please. Tell it to YOUR people. Because we’re tired. You have to start telling the truth. And then she turned away to greet a friend, and I was dismissed. It was a sentiment that—once I started listening—many women of color would echo. Don’t co-opt our stories, but maybe you should take on your own.

I knew it would take me a while to integrate the message. I was meant to be in that lag and feel the discomfort. More invitations would surface later and—I now understood—they wouldn’t stop. I would require new language for this clarified calling. My mind was spinning all the way back home to the suburbs.

Mentor

1.1 Mentor

Origin

I could start by telling you who said and did what, and all the countless ways I tried to fix things. And how in the end, I failed anyway. But that’s for later.

I want to start with another story.

When I turned six, with my grandparents and great-grandparents gathered in our living room, my mother handed me a small package as if she were bestowing a great treasure. I eagerly unwrapped it to find a plain wooden block. I held it in my palm, speechless.

It’s a chimney, Mom exclaimed. For a dollhouse like your cousins have.

Then I heard my dad’s footsteps on the stairs from the basement. He emerged, carrying the rectangular shell of a two-story, six-roomed structure.

We’ll fix it up fancy, like theirs, Mom said. I would have smiled brightly and thanked them profusely. They had it all planned out.

All my other presents went with the dollhouse. Using the smallest of hooks, my paternal Grandma Doris crocheted a tablecloth to grace a dining room table. Mom’s oldest sister, Betty, went to town painting needlepoint canvases: Cushions! Rugs! An American flag! We’d hang Betty’s miniature framed oil paintings on pins. Mom’s middle sister, Vivian, embellished a four-poster bed and upholstered wooden chair with dainty acrylic flowers. My aunts were the daughters of a commercial artist, and it showed.

In the coming months, my parents added a roof to shelter an attic and hidden bathroom. In the new front wall that swung open from hinges and latched shut in the middle, they installed window frames, divided as if for panes of glass, plus a big bay window and a working front door with a tiny doorknob and keyhole.

Mom and I sought diminutive plaid and floral wallpaper prints. At that first wallpaper store, I gleefully danced from pattern to pattern. That’s where I first learned that you can provide too much information.

Yes, this one’s wonderful, Mom nodded at one tiny wall square. The others don’t match the color scheme. Our palette was primary: red, yellow, blue. But then I must have told the sales clerk we wanted the samples for my dollhouse because Mom gave me a pointedly wide-eyed look, paired with a tight, toothy smile. We suddenly had to go someplace else.

Mom explained in the parking lot, while my eyes adjusted to the bright midday sun: You have to be careful what you say to people. She walked to our car at a fast clip, forcing me to keep up. They only give out samples because they expect you to buy something more.

I would have done my earnest best to comply with her, my earliest mentor. I was a curious, hummingbird child, observing everything, seeking the sweetness of reaching perfection, and with it, my family’s love.

Mom carpeted the whole dollhouse with gold velveteen and slipped in a thin sheet of wood veneer as a dining room floor. It was all perfect, all to scale, and I understood from the start that I needed to handle this dollhouse with absolute care.

From then on, for a few years, my aunts and cousins gave me boxes each Christmas and birthday, filled with tiny replicas of life’s necessities. I amassed ornate chairs and beds, stately desks and lamps, brown teddy bears and a magazine rack, half-inch cartons of food, a tiny muffin pan, and quarter-inch crystal salt and pepper shakers. Each time a miniature relic appeared, I’d deflate a little, before I atoned with my big smile and overeager declarations of how much I loved it. Because despite its dainty perfection, I didn’t exactly. And I felt disloyal. But they loved their gifts. And they loved me. I had no reason to complain.

Here’s how I interpret this story, looking back: All gifts—especially truly good ones—were conscripted to a higher purpose for the living of an idealized life. I was raised for this. Grandma Doris managed City Hall and her family like clockwork. She tasked me early on to maintain her family tree and traditions. She was my second mentor, though she and I tussled over our narratives. Who gets to decide whose stories get told, and in what way?

Mom’s middle sister, Vivian, taught me how to step out of the stories. Let people be people but tune people out, meaning anyone who misunderstood me. She was my third—and most subversive—mentor. Vivian’s latent powers fully emerged after she walked through the valley of the shadow of death (she lost an infant) and quit giving a damn about what people said.

Women who challenge traditions are dangerous. Vivian left her marriage after she couldn’t forget what she lost, moved to Florida when I was nine, and went into business for herself. Her crazy tales of everyday magic—including wild dreams and eerily spot-on psychics—were fodder for family lore.

Growing up, I vowed not to be like those dangerous women, nor teach high school like my math-loving mom. Not surprisingly, I would live to see myself play out all the same roles. (Read: Never say never.) I became a straight-laced high school teacher, guardian of the status quo but less wed to tradition, and later I became a dangerous woman.

She’s gone now, my former teacher self.

By the time you read this, I will have lived into another version of myself, the curator of these tales replaced by other future editions, and so on. But the me who’s present, here and now, offers you a blessing: May the journey that breaks you open also open you to compassionate love.

1.2 Mentor

Shiny Objects

Let’s back up a moment and look at my family culture. We call it Minnesota Nice, the mainstream Protestant version. You may recognize it as doing things right, being good. We don’t share uncomfortable feelings—at least not with the people involved.

The thing is, if you don’t acknowledge your feelings, they come out sideways, since the energy’s there. In other words, we smile politely while we think, say, or do shitty things. Thus the correlating phenomenon: Minnesota Passive Aggressive.

If you’re like me, and you’re hypersensitive to other people’s emotions, and your brain can’t help spotting patterns, you can’t ignore the moods around you. And so you read into everything. If someone acts strangely, you wonder if you should take it personally. We do not love such questions, we nice Minnesotans—we might not like the answers.

We’re not supposed to ask for what we want, and God forbid we impose. Our Lutheran Confession, which I spent my teen years reciting, absolves us of the resulting chaos, but barely: I have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done, and by what I have left undone. I have not loved God with my whole heart, nor loved my neighbor as myself. Lord have mercy on us.

With such standards, there’s no possible way I could measure up, ever. I’m a truth-teller, born with a clear voice. And I’m also an obliger, trying to do what’s expected of me, in a way in which I can still maintain self-respect. Mercifully, I was confirmed into what would become the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), the most liberal of all Lutheran denominations, where women purportedly enjoy equal rights. Except that, in the Bible, women don’t have fair representation, and nobody claims that they do. How then could the ELCA bestow equal rights upon women? With careful wording and only partial success, in my teenaged estimation.

Even though I liked to narrate real-life stories in my head in real time, I also knew that I had to parse out exactly what I could say, and what I had permission to write, especially regarding myself. Do I really want to tell you that I walked oddly, a long-limbed, too-skinny, knock-kneed smart girl who leaned forward bouncing up on my toes? That I spoke vibrantly with precise words and made friends very quickly but couldn’t keep them? Of course not, but it’s true.

I lacked social graces and said wrong things, which I knew all too well—both too good at school and too naïve for my own good, simultaneously hiding while trying to fit in. And possibly even shine.

At sixteen, I met my German exchange sister, Eva. She came to live with my family in Minnesota for three months and promptly identified that nasty Minnesota Nice I’d steeped in for my whole life. People here greet me by asking ‘How are you?’ she once said. "But they don’t want to hear the answer. I should say that I’m fine. In German, we call that oberflächlich." She gestured with her hand as if skimming a surface.

Superficial? I asked.

She nodded. Yes, I think so.

That makes sense. Candor was a virtue with Eva.

At seventeen, I spent three months in West Germany living with Eva’s family in what turned out to be the end of the Cold War. Eva helped me to make sense of her divided homeland, as I processed my visit to both sides of the Berlin Wall with American teens I didn’t much like. It was, in some ways, the perfect metaphor for my sense of disconnection with home. I found more belonging as an outsider, as an American, living with West German peers.

I am different now primarily thanks to Eva, who as my first friend outside of my culture, showed me how I acted inside it. Because I didn’t have strong enough language fluency to assimilate, Eva’s West Germany gave me a time-out to focus on being myself. That felt like freedom.

Returning to my hometown in that context was painful. But I learned how to survive, find true friends, and make sense of division by way of the Berlin Wall. That was a book that I thought I could write. How the Wall must come down, and walls like it. Walls outside us, and walls within. America loved—and still does—the horror show that is twentieth-century Germany, and I was not immune.

I was studying German at college when the Berlin Wall that we all thought would never fall suddenly fell, and I no longer had anything to write about. Germany was reunified. End of story. Clearly, I declared, I would never write a book! Ah, but never say never.

First I successfully taught German, even after becoming a mom of twin daughters. The year I turned forty, everything changed. By then, I’d taught for fourteen years, six as a mom, and adapted to every added responsibility. But a whole new level of awful was looming: new principals, new textbooks, and a whole new schedule of classes—some ninety minutes, some less than an hour, two levels of German per class, four levels of German all day, daily, while traveling between two high schools. This was a shit ton of work that pushed me to my limits, when added to all the preparation, communication with parents, correcting, and grade reporting that is a teacher’s baseline.

But a part of me—let’s call it my soul—understood that if school was going to eat up all of my free time, I might as well spend some of that time doing something I loved. My soul required it.

When my church choir friend Christi suggested out of the blue that we take a writing class, a shiver ran up my legs.

To be blunt, I was not doing well in my vocation. I struggled every day: mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, my attention torn between people and places. With no end in sight for the foreseeable future, I needed the singing and writing to stay afloat. And, dare I say it?

I hungered to write a book, even more than I hungered for sanity. So Christi and I enrolled in an eight-week class at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis over the summer. In October, I received an invitation to apply for a writing apprenticeship there. Not that I had time for such things. It’s just that getting the invitation felt like walking into the sunshine, out of a dark and dreary haze.

The day that I submitted my writing samples for the Loft Foreword program, I borrowed time from an active exchange program. Twenty-one German teens and their two teachers were in town, dispersed among community families I’d recruited. I carved out time from arranging logistics while I made last-minute edits to my application. I never expected the writing to pan out.

Nonetheless, the depth of my grief surprised me when the Foreword mentors didn’t accept me. They didn’t even interview me. I sensed—deep within me—that this was something big. Maybe I was becoming a writer despite my protests, in the sense that writing could become my vocation instead of a pastime. I loved it that much. Those stories of West and East Germany called to me, how I saw the Berlin Wall from both sides before the wall fell—and how many people can speak to that kind of historic experience?

And then there was my beloved Aunt Vivian. She’d recently died after years of an illness that silenced her. I needed to write about her, to capture her magnificent spirit.

Your writing’s pretty, said each writing instructor, no matter the topic. But what’s at stake in this story for you? I had no idea.

Still, when something calls you this loudly, it matters.

And you heed the call.

1.3 Mentor

Legacy

Enter my paternal Grandma Doris. I never planned to write about her, though I’ve told copious Grandma stories to anyone who would listen over the years.

During her life, we shared a relationship best described as complex. She took care of me a lot as a child and micromanaged me as I grew older. Although she loved me endlessly, she had a fierce (sometimes quite arbitrary) agenda for me, and for all of her descendants. I just knew that she’d live long and die fast, and regardless of timing, her end would come too soon and I’d struggle for resolution.

I’d also thought that she’d last longer than ninety-four, and maybe not die my first week of the new school year. But then, why wouldn’t she? When my now-husband and I announced our engagement, I’d just hung up from telling her the good news from my cell phone in my parents’ living room, when their landline rang. It was Grandma, attempting a stealthy campaign to move my wedding from June to September. Because clearly teachers have nothing better to do in September.

She might die, she said. Plus September was the month she’d married Grandpa, her first husband and father of her two children, who’d left her a widow at sixty.

Beyond that, she’d mocked my sensible bridal shoes, insisted that my wedding dress had too few beads, and pressured us to honeymoon in the same Florida condo where she’d honeymooned with her second husband, Hubert (her treat).

No, thank you, I said. I spent vacations there as a kid.

You poor child. Her voice dripped with sarcasm. Grandma never was one to hide her opinions. Except for the month when she finally died.

She and I left so much unsaid.

For example, that Florida condo she’d bought with my parents was Vivian’s dream long before it was hers. They weren’t even related except by marriage and happenstance. Twenty-three years separated Grandma and Vivian. Nobody could have predicted that both would depart in the span of two years. My two most significant elders.

I returned from Grandma’s funeral to a darkened house, with a headache. Despairing of life with her gone, I found an email that invited me to introduce myself to my fellow writers on the first day of the first online writing class I’d ever signed up for. So I announced myself by writing where I’d just been.

And just like that, I put my grief into a box wrapped in wallpaper remnants. Writing training commenced.

I got up at 5:00 a.m. and wrote every day. That’s how I started excavating family tales, gathering artifacts, threading them in. A charm, a poster, a seashell. A lovely turn of phrase. I believed—and still do—that my spirit guides were pointing me toward writing. The number 123 often cropped up, in countless signs related to writing, as if the Universe wanted to reward my magical thinking.

In the absence of other direction, I hung my hopes on these sightings. It was, to put it bluntly, a matter of survival. I promised myself that after I finished my book, I’d quit my job in an orderly fashion. Everyone knew that I was writing a book, and everyone knew that my career was living on borrowed time. I couldn’t write fast enough.

Here’s the hidden story that started to emerge:

As a beginning teacher in my twenties, administrators lauded me as a golden child, fated to become a master teacher. They nurtured me until my voice was strong. In a cruel twist of fate, my strong voice recast me as a nuisance in my forties. Though I did the right things—old methods that had always worked, and new strategies that certain people admired—things overall were completely chaotic for me.

New administrators came in from Minneapolis and changed all the rules. They wanted to make their mark on education, so they decided to eliminate German as soon as possible in a school district rich with German heritage.

Worse yet, for the first time ever, neither Vivian nor Grandma Doris was there to console me. In their gaping absence, I suddenly realized that both women had turned a page in their forties. Grandma had taken over City Hall. Vivian had moved out of town in the prime of her very confining marriage and constructed a whole second life. And me? I was permanently reassigned to teach introductory Spanish, when Spanish was my backup plan, in case of emergency only. This was that just-in-case moment.

I desperately clung to a fragment of advice I’d transcribed onto steno paper at age twenty-seven, from a tape-recorded handwriting analysis by my aunt’s preferred psychic. This mysterious Florida woman predicted my difficult passage with eerie precision. It would start by age thirty-nine, lasting up to nine years. Its shadow loomed over my thirties, but—make no mistake—the reading prepared me for trouble ahead.

Specifically, she said that a burden would arise to teach me a lesson and create wonderful new foundations—and it would be very emotional, due to its nature. I would do twelve things at once and the work of three people. But as a result of what I would learn then, I’d be ready to take on leadership roles around creativity later, around forty-seven or eight. I was to stay positive. And I’d need confidence.

People will take you at your word, my aunt’s psychic said. Opportunities will fall into your lap. Take advantage. It was as if she’d handed me a personal fortune cookie, one I savored until it grew stale.

And so I followed her advice. I reapplied to the Foreword writing apprenticeship and was accepted, taking personal time off from school to attend the two sessions a month. I flew to Chicago for nine weekend seminars, earning concurrent certificates in Editing (Chicago style) and German-to-English translation. The only remaining items on my self-styled curriculum were life coach training and a finished book. But so far, no real opportunities had materialized, career-wise.

Simultaneously, I’d piloted every promising new technology that my school district adopted in pursuit of a more perfect learning system. For example, lecture notes written directly onto a laptop and posted online. Except that now, I couldn’t stay caught up because moderating online content exponentially increased my workload. Also, new grading systems and new grading software to go with a new grading philosophy. Personalized, Standards-Based Learning, they called it. I was determined to show people that it could work.

You can be sure that this didn’t endear me to people who liked the status quo.

One time, a colleague’s husband reviewed class enrollment numbers and determined that there was no possible room for me to teach Spanish Three. But my fellow teachers didn’t allow me to look at those numbers, to see if I could suggest something else. Why should he— a non-employee—be allowed to see and not me? Because my colleagues didn’t pretend that they wanted me to teach Spanish at all, let alone Spanish Three. And I was counting on my book for an exit.

My chaos came to a head at a summer island writing retreat, where I conjured up portals to my family’s collective past. All day I staged my private room like that miniature dollhouse, dresser and table and armoire laden with the treasures and toys that I’d brought there myself: Fairy-tale dolls.