Mater Gladiatrix
Today is International Women’s Day and I am inclined to write a story about the two most meaningful women that have shaped my life. They are my mother, Dr. Ludmilla Ann Uher Prosdocimi Marin Jenkins and Kimberly Ann Grogg Marin. I use all of their names because women have the mostly unique experience of living with the historical convention of assuming the surname of their husbands. This gives rise to many machinations and distortions in their history and perhaps even in their self image. I am a man that does not resent women, but is rather very respectful of them for very selfish reasons. I have been guided and helped by women and feel that they are far more a force for good in life than most of the men I have met. I do not mean to be a gender traitor in this view, but rather to openly argue why men are more about moving mankind through nature while women do that and at the same time move the entire species through nature to grace. The juxtaposition of nature and grace has increasingly become a theme I find in life every day and to me marks the true meaning of life. We are here not just to survive and prosper, but to move ourselves to a collective place of grace. That is why I still like the title I gave my mother. She was Mater Gladiatrix and many women are equally compelled to be the Gladiatrix of their families.
I have written seven books and am 100+ pages into another. The best book, by far, that I have written is the one about the life of my mother, Mater Gladiatrix. I have a vertical bookshelf dedicated to holding about 100 copies of the paperback version of the book and really do mean to give them out to friends and family whenever I can. The life and times of Millie Jenkins (using her nickname and her latest legal last name) were truly amazing and make for an interesting read. I have been told that many times by many readers. Some have shared it with their family members, particularly their daughters, which I take great pride in since it is exactly the sentiment I would wish to evoke that Millie was a role model for the ages. Don’t get me wrong, I know that she was my mother and we all love our mothers, but I really feel she was so much more. Living a century meant that she eclipsed several generational shifts from the lost generation to the greatest generation to the silent generation to my baby boomer generation and beyond. She drove a car when they were still relatively uncommon. She went to college when only the most privileged women did so. She worked and supported herself fifty years ahead of her gender’s move into the workplace. She globalized herself from her humble beginnings as the middle daughter of immigrants living in the rural and generally unaware part of the nation. She was a single parent when people took pity on women in that spot. And she exhibited a degree of adventurous spirit that is noteworthy by any standard including today’s. She was an icon for women of the world and she was my personal hero because of all of that and the fact that she imbued me simultaneously with ambition and humanity. She taught me that the two are not mutually exclusive.
It is that aspect of her nature that stands out the most to me today as I think of the International Women’s Day. She was at the peak of her career in 1975 (59 years old) and a UN Diplomat who was a Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization based in Rome. As such and as she was focused on setting up and administering worldwide programs especially for women in the developing world, she became one of the central organizers of the 1975 Mexico City World Conference on Women. She was less about being on the podium than about remaining on the front line of attack, where the rubber meets the road, at the proverbial coal face, where the actual work of advancing the rights and capabilities of women was being done. For a woman that was not particularly maternal and certainly not motherly in the traditional milk and cookies way that we think of our mothers in this country, she knew all about the detriments and benefits of Nestle’s baby formula versus mother’s breast milk. She understood the difference between swaddling infants tightly as the Germanic people generally do or loosely as the Mediterranean mothers tend to do. She understood good nutrition on a writ large basis, but ate pickled herring and fried burgers for a last minute dinner for me.
My mother has been dead now for four years, having lived a ripe 100 years, and I am sixty-seven with three kids that are thirty-eight, thirty-four and twenty-five respectively. One would think that at my age I would have moved on, but when I listened to the news today and was reminded that it was International Women’s Day I immediately thought of my mother. We should all have that kind of impact in our lives. And I realized that I didn’t need to harken back to my mother to have a woman of substance to honor. I need only wander into the living room or kitchen and there I would find my fair Kim.
Kim grew up as the youngest of three children in a small town in Indiana. He father was a retired Army Colonel who worked in commercial real estate in that very small Indiana town. Her mother was a salt of the earth woman who made lunch every day for all her male relatives who came to her house for their midday break. Kim sang and danced her way through grade school and high school and went off to Indiana University with a song and love in her heart and an ambition that related mostly to more song and love and perhaps a bit of dance and theatrics. Kim was not at all short of ambition, but it related to what she loved, not to money, fame or power. Everyone who met Kim loved Kim. I myself fell in love with Kim over one dinner and have had the good sense to never look back.
Kim spent a decade in Los Angeles after college working at Elizabeth Arden and for the rock band Whitesnake. She then spent the next thirty years or so in New York alternating with her musical theater career and teaching drama to little girls in private school. When I met her she was working perhaps five survival jobs, doing an off-off-Broadway play for no pay, playing a corrupt politician and living with another woman in a sixth-floor walk-up apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. At age forty-seven, she had never been given flowers by a man (at least a straight man). If there was ever a tragedy in the world, I thought that was it. This is a woman who deserves to be given flowers every day.
Kim is a person with so much love to give the world that she showers me, her family, her friends and her dog (first Cecil and now Betty) with more love than any of us deserve. If you ask me why I am on this earth, I would probably say something inane like to tell stories. If you ask Kim why she is on this earth she has a much more elegant answer, to love. There is no measure of ambition and humanity that can exceed that. Kim is now my Mater Gladiatrix and I expect I will have to write an even better book about her.