Learning Life’s Lessons Along the Way : Coping: It’s time to celebrate the season of giving, and of learning to receive. Of feeling safe, of speaking the truths about our lives.

In her new book, Gloria Steinem reminds us that we teach what it is we need to learn. I have, of course, known this for some time, though I’ve said it differently. On countless occasions I’ve said to my students, “It’s not an accident that I’m a women’s studies professor.”

Recently, one of my closest friends, who is also the mother of my goddaughter, asked me why it was that my house had become a way station for young women who were seeking a mother figure. I laughed, said a quick goodby, and wondered why I was crying 10 minutes later.

It was the eve of the winter solstice, and I was on my way to buy a Christmas tree, something I had been avoiding for days.

My mother and my grandmothers passed the traditions of Christmas on to me. They taught me to love tall, full, Scotch pines. I learned to decorate the tree using the handmade straw Scandinavian ornaments that my mother’s mother brought with her from Norway. We never used anything but small white lights; “Tinkerbell lights” I used to call them.

Ten years ago, my mother died right after Christmas--only days after her birthday. I couldn’t fathom then how her death would haunt me for years. I can’t forget that my parents married on Dec. 23, little Christmas Eve in the Scandinavian tradition. The marriage ended in divorce, and I feel sad as the date approaches, remembering too that it was during the Christmas holiday that they told my sister and me that our father wouldn’t be living with us anymore. That my relationship with my father is better than ever doesn’t matter.

I am weeping tonight because I know that my home is a safe place for young women to spend six months or a year while they make scary decisions about college, relationships and careers. And I must squarely face up to the fact that this isn’t an accident. That we teach what we need to learn.

I teach Women’s Studies. I’m know as the utility infielder of my department. I teach the intro course, the marriage and family, the sexuality and the women’s health courses. I teach “Images of Women in Popular Culture.” I teach about feminism, about learning to know and trust yourself. I teach women to think critically and creatively. I teach women to laugh.

I also a direct a feminist women’s health center called Womancare. Here we offer women a lot of things, but we are best known because we offer women the right to choose an abortion. We stand squarely on the front lines of feminism as we provide abortion services in the face of threats to our organization, and to us and to me.

The clinic is a safe haven for women. Women learn about their bodies, and their decisions are celebrated. I feel proud to be in a position to help women as they take control over their own lives.

In the classroom women are given permission to speak, to listen and to take intellectual risks. I urge them to find their voices and to use them.

In my home, one, or sometimes two women rent a room with a bath. And, for some reason, feelings of hope and optimism prevail in my house.

I feel compelled to make the world a safer place for girls and women. I will never cease to wonder what might have happened if my mother had had some different kind of support.

My mother was probably schizophrenic or maybe manic-depressive. But somehow she raised me well enough that I can negotiate in the world. And I do mean negotiate.

When I was a teen-ager we lost everything. My mother was in a deep depression. She didn’t pay the rent. I was already living with my husband-to-be, and my sister was with our aunt. My mother, the woman who taught me to value our household, let the house go. The mother who demanded that I always be well-mannered “did it wrong.” Big-time wrong. All the photographs, the keepsakes and the Christmas ornaments were lost. That was the least of it. Shortly thereafter she disappeared. Then she died. My sister and I struggle to make things right with ourselves and with one another. Sometimes we succeed. We never stop trying.

But tonight, I build on the foundation that my mother shaped. Tonight I search for the ornaments that I have collected over the years. They are in a box in the garage that has no room for my car, but is instead filled with the boxes of young women who need a safe place to store their belongings.

Tonight I listen to Joan Baez singing Christmas carols on the record player. I light a fire in the fireplace using wood that a friend chopped for me. Tonight, the women who live in my house will return home to find a beautiful tree in the front yard. They’ll help me haul it inside.

Together we’ll celebrate the season of giving, and of learning to receive. Of feeling safe, of speaking the truths about our lives.

And maybe someday soon I’ll feel safe enough to love again. Perhaps I’ll have a daughter or a son. My children will have a unique group of extraordinary women to whom they can turn should they ever need a place to feel safe. The women who lived in my house while I taught the lessons I needed to learn.