The Normalcy Series Pt. 1
The Normalcy Series
As I ruminate in the autumn of my life I wonder if there is a thread, theme, or nuance that remains consistent between, within and without the many diverse experiences I have been fortunate to have had. I think there is and I think it is something called normalcy. “We just want to feel normal for a little while like the college kids up on the hill”. “I just wanted to feel normal like other men my age, with a wife and children”. “Ma, does my mood disorder make me abnormal?”
So what does normal mean? Is it place dependent? When in Rome do as the Romans do? Is it culturally dependent as in relative culture e.g. female circumcision is an important rite in some cultures regardless of the danger and pain it imposes on the female? Or is it moral relativism that is normal. “If you feel normal therefore you are normal.”
The dictionary I read this morning broke the word normal into different forms. The first was the word normal as an adjective within which there is carved subsets of psychology, medicine, mathematics (which surprisingly had the largest range of definitions) and physical sciences such as chemistry. At its core, however, normal as adjective is defined as conforming to a standard or common type; serving to establish a standard. Normal used as a noun refers to average or mean such as “…production may fall below normal”. Synonyms for normal include average, commonplace, ordinary, typical, usual and/or accustomed. The synonyms were the words I’d hear as I spun through these experiences. But the wish would always be: I want to be normal like……………..
So I decided that perhaps a short series centered on the concept of normalcy would be a way that allows me to share these experiences. If they resonate with each and every one of your own sense of ‘normalness’ that you come to realize what we all share with those a bit different, then perhaps it has been worth the excuse of writing to avoid doing laundry. The first piece has to do with teaching college courses in the Central Correctional Institute about 25 years ago as I finished up my grad work at the University of South Carolina. And like most memoirs, memories and folks tend to blend together into composites of one another while the core of the story remains true.
Going Native in Prison
I had worked for about 20 years as a registered nurse before I decided to go back to school and miracles of miracles I was in graduate school at The USC. But I was older, broker and working every teaching gig I could get my hands on in addition to maintaining my psychiatric nursing hours over weekends so I could retain my health insurance. The opportunity arose to teach at the South Carolina Central Correctional Institution (CCI). Located in downtown Columbia it had been built in 1860 and was intensely Dickensian in appearance and mood. South Carolina had established an educational division consisting of both extension courses from the USC flagship campus up the hill as well as certificates from the local community college in a range of vocational fields.
I figured how bad can it be? After all I’m surrounded by correctional officers (CO) and these folks seem pretty committed to the program. Well they were all committed to the program, driven by a variety of self interest There was a student council with elected members and regular meetings. The student body president and vice-president met me at the entrance to escort me to the classroom after a female CO patted me down. I looked at her when she escorted me to a small private room to be patted down and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me! Look at me, I’m a chunky munky granny!” She grinned and said, “Yes Ma’am, regulations, y’know.” I pointed out to her that she was shorter than I and, gasp! She did not have a sidearm, though she had a pretty mean looking baton on her belt. She just grinned lazily and said, “No offense, Ma’am but I’m younger….and a lot meaner.” She was probably right about that. As Ray and the other officer escorted me down these dark underground tunnels with inmates hanging out on the turbines, smoking and doing the usual catcalls, I stopped. Ray seemed to immediately know what just struck me, because there was no way any of this was normal for me. “Oh professor,” he said, the CO is just now coming up the hall, we just thought we’d get a head start.” So I silently sighed and turned around to the CO who was joining us and what
My eyes see but a man who was so wizened he could have been 100 years old and if he weighed 100lbs I”d eat my bookbag! He did have his mean baton out swinging it. Ray leaned down and whispered, “We’re not going to let anything happen to you. It is not in our interest to do so because this program and the vocational program is more important to the prisoners than most people realize.” It proved to be the most fascinating semester I had had teaching but nothing, and I mean nothing felt normal to me as I understood it.
There are any number of things I could talk about from beginning the class and trying to explain political power to them. Right! Go ahead, roll on the floor laughing till your guts hurt! Riiiight! Or I could talk about the clown from the voc center next door who kept popping his head into my class which I was trying to get situated for their debate about the conlict between Israel and Palestine. Finally I headed toward the door and closed it and the room of some 25 men gasped almost in unison and one of the older guys said, “Miss, open it and open it now!!!! Strict rules say the door has to be opened!!” I just stood there looking at him and suggested they enlighten me as to what their own home grown clown was doing. Everyone looked at their feet, muttering waiting for me to open the door,getting more restless as I kept leaning against it. Finally the truth (well a modified version of the truth, I don’t think I ever heard the full truth while I was in there) revealed a large as in $500 betting pool that passions would run so high between the two teams debating that there would a lock down and I’d get caught in behind it. I looked at them and was trying to figure out which way to jump when I asked, “Who’s holding the money?” They all pointed to Clown who was scratching outside the door. I opened it abruptly, grabbed him by his collar and pulled him in and all the students gasped again. “I understand you are holding the betting money. Give me $100 of it.” What? No!! What you doing?! “One hundred and now! “I bellowed as the students seemed to engage in a shushing contest. Clown sheepishly produced 5 $20 bills and I put him in a chair and told him not to open his mouth till this debate he was so interested in was over. THEN I opened the door. I reminded them this was a debate not a hollering contest and that the winner was judged upon how clear and evidence supported the team’s key points were. Then I said, “And THIS my friends is NOT a normal way to teach Poli Sci 101.”
Each Tuesday night during class intermission, Ray and the other student body officer asked me to join them in the library for a coke which I always refused. After about six weeks into the semester, they came to me, their faces down and looking worried, so I invited them to sit with me during break and chat. The following is what Ray said: “Doc, we knew when you came in here that it would take time for you to trust us. We’ve done everything we know to make it comfortable and reassuring but you still won’t have a soft drink with us. Trust me it is not spiked or anything. We just want to sit and chat with you like in the office hours you have with the kids up on the hill. We just want to be normal. For those of us who will be getting out, learning how to be normal in a college, something that is so abnormal for us is just as important as learning the stuff out of the book. Don’t you like us? Want to chat with us?”My jaw dropped open because it had never occurred to me that my refusal which had more to do with drying me out before class so I wouldn’t have to use the bathroom facilities than not liking them. I thought a minute about how on earth I could say what I needed to say. “Ray, you know that routine one has to go through to get to the bathroom….walking down the corridor with all the voc tech students squatting on the floor against the wall as I walked IN MY SKIRT! around 3 corners lined up with more students doing who knows what till you called the female custodian who unlocked the hasp. She instructed me to hang it over the loop on the inside then tell you who would be standing guard on the door when I was finished. Ray, that’s not NORMAL!! So I have been dehydrating myself on Tuesdays so I don’t have to use the bathroom.” The look on his face was one of having been thunderstruck.
“Oh doc, is that why you stopped wearing those pretty skirts and began wearing pants?? We never even considered that, but then we are men and it’s not as big a deal for us as it is women. We don’t ever get to socialize with women on a polite basis or just chat with a professor about questions about the course.”
So there we were two people for whom normal in some circumstances did not exist but on another level did exist. That week I announced I’d be holding office hours in my ‘office’ (class room) so anyone wishing to chat could come up and chat. I was pleased that Ray and a couple of others asked me to their graduations and proudly presented me to their relatives who came, many of whom never made it past the eighth grade. It was totally normal.
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Comments
Did that make any sense whatsoever?
I don't think I have ever been normal. Life would have been and would be easier if I was somehow normal.
Dorinda and Mrs. R, the theme is, at least till now, consistent among those who respond that each of us has felt outside of 'normal' yet we manage satisfying if sometimes difficult lives.
If normal is a standard to be met, would you agree that it is also a way to maintain social control and I do not mean in some SciFi horror fiction kind of way. But rather as a means to, at the risk of being biologically reductive, maintaining and propogating the human species. If that is true, could we deduce then, that what is normal or the standard shifts from time to time and if we do not feel it, it might be because we have not shifted enough, either quantitatively or qualitatively?
Ray and some of his more erudite and articulate friends in prison were yearning desparately for a door to open for them of 'being normal' and were holding onto the belief that education would do that for them. I did not have the heart to point out that in the late 1980s even if they had not been in prison, the chances of becoming normal in the ways he wanted it would probably never be open to him. You see African American men in South Carolina who were mid-30's when I met them only had a 35-40% chance of finishing 8th grade and going onto high school. So I finally understood that barring that being available to them, maybe remembering how to talk to 'regular' women as they perceived them. Though from my perspective I would hardly be considered a 'regular woman' I did get the gist of that piece of normal. I live in a truly remote area and there are not many men and I miss men, so I am ridiculously flirtatious when I"m around one, married or not. Yah really endears me to the community but we all know it's not going anywhere, that I am ummmm just exercising my normal muscles as it were:) In the next episode a young man who craved what he thought was his due as far as normalcy was concerned takes his journey trying to reclaim pieces of it as he understood it.
Thanks for coming by and joining in the discussion.
From there I went on to break all the family rules and went to college... three times. I have also survived abuse, raised (and am raising) a variety of children, married a man who is encouraging me to take the steps to follow the REST of my dream which is to return to the reservation and work to improve the lives of those forced by history, circumstance and economics to live there.
I HAVE come to the conclusion though that while I may not be "societally normal" I am perfectly normal FOR ME.
I think I (we?) use it as a stand-in for "belonging" which is very fundamental -- even low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs, implying that it is foundational for our well being.
Normal = Accepted, yes? (or not.)