If that title didn’t catch your eye and make you want to read this post, then I should just pack up and get on with it. In fact, according to Rhoda Janzen’s memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Mennonites have seemingly no fun at all. There’s no dancing, drinking, or smoking, they have little belief for higher education (more knowledge=more questions=more opportunity to doubt and/or question God), they pack mortifying school lunches of smelly leftovers, and we haven’t even touched on their sense of fashion. You’ll have to excuse the broad liberties I have taken in compiling that list, but it is not wholly unfounded. I had to come up with those ideas from some place. Janzen talks about these tribulations of the Mennonite lifestyle and more in her memoir, which I laughed my way
through.
photo courtesy of us.mcmillan.com
Janzen story starts with the traumatizing event of a hysterectomy at age 43. Well, it should be upsetting for most, but not Janzen. She feels an odd peace with the whole procedure, finding it not be a problem. The only setback is the small nick the surgeon accidentally puts in her bladder, sending her home with a catheter for six months following surgery. Ouch. A few short months after that her husband of fifteen years leaves her for a man called Bob, whom he met on Gay.com. Burn. In the same week she is involved in a car crash that breaks what might as well be her whole body. Catastrophe. Her best option? Return to her parent’s Mennonite community and get in touch with her unique and slightly misunderstood roots.
The story continues from there with Janzen detailing many facets of the Mennonite life and how she slowly strayed away from her background. While the stories are distinctive and unlike so much of what I’ve read, it’s her humor (and her mother’s) that propel the book forward. The incessantly upbeat and can-do attitude are striking. I’m not sure if I could pick up and carry on quite like she did. Additionally, she manages to interject humor seamlessly into stories about smelly borscht at the lunch table or her mother ripping farts in a department store (yes, that’s in there).
Interestingly, the book makes a shift about two-thirds of the way through. It moves from tales of the ol’ Mennonites to how she has overcome both her broken marriage and body. I didn’t necessarily see this transition coming and it took me slightly by surprise. But I was intrigued by her life lessons, which helped the book come full-circle.
By the end I was still thinking about one line that stuck with me from the fourth chapter. After considering whether her life would have been completely altered had she not ever had her first date with her now ex-husband she finally surmises that No, somehow she would have ended up with him anyway. Although fifteen years of her life came with abundant hurt from his bipolarity and emotional abuse that doesn’t upset her to the degree that it would most of us. She wonders, “Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?” What an amazing outlook to have on so much time that other people would deem a wasted! Her stories are hilarious, her humor is perfect, but I think it is her perspective that is most admirable.
Surely, you should read this book.
A Broad At Home 