I’ve decided
it’s time to “find myself.”
Back in the
1960s, when Women’s Liberation was a big news item on a regular basis, women burned
their bras in protest. (Nuf said. You can draw your own mental pictures and
conclusions.) Women abandoned their husbands saying, “I have to go find myself,”
leaving their mates scratching their heads trying to figure out what that
meant.
I was just a
kid. I didn’t understand it, either. Didn’t grownups get to do whatever they
wanted? They didn’t have a boss telling them when to peel potatoes for supper, wash the supper dishes, clean their rooms, take a
bath, wash behind your ears. They got to make all the decisions and everyone
else had to live with those choices. Right?
NOW I
understand.
As a young
wife I considered the lives of the older women who influenced me. One of the
things I noticed was that they, for the most part, sacrificed so much for their
husbands and families. Someone had to make the final decisions about
everything. Some women “wore the pants in the family” because their husbands
wouldn’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t. Some were partners with their husbands, discussing
things and deciding together, and still others were martyrs, believing they
were earning Purple Hearts because they never took off their wedding rings from
the day they were slipped onto their fingers and the vows were taken, as if
their peers would admire them for their commitment to a bad relationship. Or
perhaps that thought never occurred to them. Maybe it is something that happened
when they were struggling just to survive, to raise their children, to just make
do…
“When I was
growing up,” he said, “we learned about making do.” He sounded like he believed
she knew not one thing about ‘making do.’
“I thought ‘making
do’ was a temporary, not permanent, state,” she replied. “And when I can’t use
the washer, do you expect me to take the laundry down to the creek and beat it
clean with rocks?”
He didn’t
appreciate her wit and sense of humor at all. Maybe it takes one to know one.
When a woman
is kept busy running a household, raising children, and full time employment
outside the home in addition to being the family supervisor, there is little
time for her tend to her own needs. Then work in some elderly parents with health issues requiring dependence on their children. If her life partner doesn’t step up to help
her, she becomes lost, but she’s too busy to notice…until Empty Nest occurs.
After 20 or 30 years of being family supervisor—aka Mom—everyone expects her to
suddenly flip a switch to turn off Mom mode and go on her merry way.
“You don’t
have children to take care of now,” he says. “You can go get a job.”
Will he
never understand? Her parents passed away. He had just expected her to pick up and keep going
without taking healing time. But maybe she was taking too much time to heal…or
maybe she was healing from a lifetime of being too busy to think about her own
needs, and now she needs the time to get back on her emotional feet, no thanks to him.
The Glass Menagerie. I want to read that again. I read
it in college for the freshman English series. I think I have a story idea from
that play and the class.
And I have
decided…I am on a journey of self-discovery, to find me. What is fact? What is
fiction? About this blog entry, I mean. Only the author can say. And it’s time
to write that story.
© 2013 Cathy
Thomas Brownfield ~ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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