11.JUNE.00
(I don't
have an official "who" page, so this as close as you get ,for
now...)
Flashback
I
Flashback....1944.
I'm remembering the first home movies my father took, shortly after
I was born. Perhaps I was 4 months old. Replaying this reel in my mind,
I see the shower water lightly raining down on a baby "swimming" in
the tub. Arms flailing, feet kicking, and head bobbing, like one of
those dolls you see in back windows of cars. I "swim" back and forth
fighting against the slippery, shallow current. It looks almost like
I'm trying to avoid getting caught in the vortex and swirl down the
drain.
In retrospect,
this scene which begins our family documentary could be a metaphor for
much of my life. For I've spent a lot of time resisting the forces around
me and fighting for my own survival in one way or another.
"Children
should be seen and not heard," and "spare the rod and spoil the child,"
were still clichés to live by in the fifties. If I suffered abuse
in my family, it was likely to have been seen as acceptable by the standards
of the times. Spanking your child with or without a belt was a fairly
common practice then. Slapping was common, and pulling hair was not
unheard of either. Sharing tales with friends from that era leads me
to believe that destroying the self esteem of children was rampant also.
Ward and June Cleaver were a myth. But father knew best all right, and
if you didn't believe that, you'd find out soon enough because he was
sure to set you straight when he got home. Obedience was expected, perhaps
even more so in my military family.
Roles of
women and men were clearly defined there. Women cooked, cleaned, shopped,
sewed, and took care of all home and family needs. Men worked and mowed
the lawn and took out the trash, and went hunting and fishing. In spite
of these strict role definitions, for whatever reasons I was allowed
to diverge somewhat. Maybe my constant requests to learn to do some
of those guy things just whittled down my Dad's resistance and I was
allowed, even encouraged, to learn to shoot a gun, to do archery and
to fish. Perhaps having done those few "male" oriented things then gave
me some sort of experience from which I could draw strength later when
I was on my own, and going against the flow. I knew I could meet the
unexpected challenge.
But, most
of my survival skills consisted of trying to figure out how to glean
the tiniest grain of approval from my withholding or critical parents,
and how not to get broad sided physically or verbally. My coping mechanism
was mainly just to go along with the program most of the time. And when
I didn't, I just made sure I didn't get caught. Luckily, I was a pretty
smart kid and that helped a lot at home. Even though, according to my
father, I was never "smart enough" I didn't have the double curse of
having to pay the price for making bad grades on top of everything else.
In school
being smart was not necessarily a plus with most other kids. I shared
things intellectual with a few close friends, but mostly by the time
I was in high school, I had learned I needed to "dumb down" in order
to survive there. In addition, I was the skinny kid with glasses, so
I was always the gal who was "best friends" with all the guys.
When I
went away to college, it was like letting a bird out of the cage. Because
limits had always been set for me, I really did not know how to set
my own. I flew, but with my clipped wings, I fell on my face a lot.
I reveled, in the true sense of the word, in my freedom. I ended up
hanging out with the then radical anti war, anti-establishment types,
and met the man who would become my first husband. I turned on, tuned
in, and after a year and a half, I dropped out. One thing was certain.
I was never going to go home again! I never wanted to be confined in
my family ever again.
I worked
for about a year, and despite opposition of my family, I got married,
and followed my husband as he went off to graduate school. I thought
I was finally free of my past, and off to live a new and interesting
life. For a while it seemed so, as we hung out with the radical philosophy
crowd, the hippie fringe, and participated in peace marches and civil
rights marches, and discussed politics and philosophy ad nauseum.
He went
to school and I worked. He got his degree and I had a kid. It wasn't
an accident, I wanted a kid. I was tiring of being HIS appendage among
HIS friends, yet for some reason I still believed in the fifties dream
of the happy little family, slightly altered with sixties thinking.
So for a time I tried on the role of faculty wife and mother, having
yet another child, not planned. I really tried hard to survive in this
role, and to make my marriage and family work. In the end, it boiled
down to the fact that my father had signed over my ownership papers
to my new husband. And once again I felt trapped in a place where I
was desperately trying to please other people and loosing myself in
the process.
Somewhere
around this time, as my marriage began to slowly disintegrate, I became
aware of the Women's Liberation Movement. Those ideas made a lot of
sense to me--it was only logical to desire to be equal, to want equal
pay for equal work, to have the same opportunity to pursue a career
that men had. After all, how was gender equality any different than
racial equality? When I mentioned my curiosity about becoming a part
of this to my husband, his exact response was "Over my dead body!".
As I look back now, I know that this was a defining moment in spurring
my own move toward independence.
Things
got worse. We sought counseling. And, in a ridiculous effort to "save
our marriage", we were encouraged by a male therapist to go ahead and
have that third child my husband wanted so that he could have another
chance at being the sort of father he felt he had failed to be with
the other two. In spite of my gut telling me otherwise, I fell for it
and had my third. Now that I look back I view it as prime example of
a male conspiracy to "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant".
Time came
for me to swim against the current once more, seeking self and survival.
It took
several years. I embraced feminism, joined a consciousness raising group
and changed and grew from that experience. I found a wonderful female
therapist who helped me tremendously with my self esteem issues. I went
back to college to get a degree in History. But things changed! And,
change was good. Life offered new possibilities in ways I never would
have expected, and got a degree in Fine Art instead.
Finally,
I got a divorce and despite periodic attempts by my ex to regain control,
I did manage to survive and work and raise my kids alone for a while.
Not everything about this experience was good. Not every decision
I made was right. But I learned, and I found more bits and pieces of
myself in the process.
I remarried
six years later, eventually started my own jewelry design business which
became the sole means of income for our family. I simply did not want
to be in any position where I was entirely dependent on a man any longer.
My husband joined my business shortly after it began, and together we
worked in it as partners for over twenty years. Now we are am slowly
giving up the jewelry business as it was, and I'm working on coming
to terms with what I really want from my art life. At the moment that
takes the form of working in the book arts, specializing in book
clasps, and book repair and resotration.
If you've
read here for a while, then you know that I also freelance in other
areas as well. In the meantime, I am also becoming more and more a part
of the book and collectibles business as we sell our books
on eBay and at book fairs in this area.
We still
share the same space day after day. We've both done a lot of swimming
upstreamthrough some perilous waters, at times, during our marriage
and business ventures. In spite of it all, we somehow continue to survive.