Tag: Women in Society

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Don’t—And I Can’t Stress This Enough—Let Years Go By

I never had a dad, or a father, or a pop. I had a step-father for a while, but that… didn’t end well. I’ve lived over 50 years with no father/daughter connection. It was always my reality, as I’m sure it is for many people, that there was simply no dad.

I’ve often been fascinated by adults who have loving relationships with their parents, but only as a novelty. I could see it, witness it, but that was all. I was never moved by it.

My mom left me when I was twelve, basically wielding a big, shiny pair of scissors and clipping off our love with a decisive snip!, letting it fall unceremoniously to the floor, where it wriggled and gasped for a while before finally fading into nothingness. I’ve been essentially parentless most of my life.

Last month, on father’s day, I finally found the man behind the name misspelled on my birth certificate. He passed away in 2020, but I spoke to his siblings—who each revealed their unique version of him. At first, it was charming, discovering an uncle, an auntie, and a few cousins. But a few days after these telephone conversations, I was left with a prick of sorrow. Aspects of their descriptions felt familiar enough for this man to be recognizable. He was my dad.

And now, about a month later, while I do feel a little more whole, I also realize the immense loss. Certainly it’s regretful that I didn’t reach him before he died. But more than that, what I missed as a girl and as a woman—to not have had that figure in my life—is painfully evident. My perspective on a father’s love is clearer, and almost every day, I’m seeing what I was denied. Also, it turns out I was the only child he had, so he missed out as well.

I don’t know what happened after I was born, why my parents didn’t stay together. I only know my mother was eternally unhappy, and by the 80s, all three of us were just floating around out there, separate from each other. It seems to have been a genuine opportunity missed. It’s unlikely my young life would have played out worse than it did if we’d stayed together, or if I’d at least known him. It’s possible, of course. But from what I’m constantly learning about what it means to be human, unlikely.

So, all I can say is this, find that lost family member; a parent, child, or sibling, whomever it may be. Don’t wait, don’t make excuses, or worry about rejection (though I know that’s a hard one), just find them. Now.

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The Hard Work of Making Other People Comfortable

February Along the South Yamhill River
7 minute read:

I’m disabled. I have been for a number of years, but not many people are aware of it. For one thing, I don’t have a lot of people in my orbit; a handful of good friends whom we left behind when we moved out to the sticks, a spouse and a son, and about a dozen doctors, PAs, therapists, etc. Aside from cashiers, pharmacists, and gas station attendants I don’t interact with a whole lot of people. And when I do, it’s a treat as I’m mostly home alone six days a week. When I’m around others, I’m usually chipper and friendly despite being in pain and living in a fog.

This is where things get dark… and a little sexist.

In the world I live in, women are expected to make others (generally, men) comfortable. I’ve been trained, starting when I was a teenager, to not disrupt the genteel existences of the few adults around me. So I quietly internalized having been abused. My guardian—my uncle—made it clear (without actually saying the words, of course) that he didn’t intend to deal with what my mother’s estranged husband had done. As a teenager, I had strong opinions about what I’d been through, and in response, my uncle expelled me from his home, washed his hands of me. I learned at 15 not to make men uncomfortable.

Maybe we shouldn’t be comfortable with the way those in power treat those who are vulnerable?

I want to pause and acknowledge I’m obviously writing from the cis-gender perspective. The movement to recognize that human gender is more complex than a simple binary breakdown is another conversation for another time, and one I support with enthusiastic hopefulness. I’m no expert on gender fluidity, or really anything, but it seems a number of societal problems could be relieved by not pigeonholing people into a rigid and limited system of self-identification. But, again, that’s a whole ‘nuther conversation. I’m a cis-woman, that’s where I write from.

Moving on… For a while there, health insurance was hard to come by for a lot of Americans. I needed it and didn’t have it for a decade, so I masked through the pain to work so I could hopefully earn it. And I still mask, as a survival strategy. Animals do it, too. They mask so other animals don’t kill them. I masked so I could be employed.

The effect of this was that I was usually dissociated from my own body—which had its pros and cons.

Pro: I could get a temporary placebo effect from pretending everything was okay, but it was temporary (con). Pain serves a purpose. It’s there to tell you to stop and tend to the problem. I was telling my body to shut up and wait its turn, and it shouted back, “Fuck you! Pay attention to me, now… or else!” 

I’ve been living in the “Or else!” stage since the early 2010s. And today, the Social Security Administration is asking me to demonstrate how hurt I’ve been, and for how long.

Now I have to experience my body and learn how to live in the torturous truth.

I’m still afraid of making people uncomfortable. I tend to apologize for being sick. One of my doctors is wonderful about it. She’s a good egg. I’m lucky to have her. She’s the one who finally figured out that I have Ankylosing Spondylitis. But I’m careful with the others—especially the men. When men are uncomfortable, generally they disengage. Apparently many of them can’t help it, I guess it’s a human weakness. So I read the room.

I want, I desire, to live in the dark, torturous truth.

I want to learn how to live there; I will be pissed if that superpower was ‘nurtured’ out of me by adults who were really shitty at adulting. I need to occupy that pit, to hang brocade curtains and burn scented candles there. I will make that pit my homely home full of books, dog toys, and home-baked bread, since those adults failed to provide one for me. I will live out my days in my comfy-cozy pit of despair, and not sugar coat a damn thing for anyone.

 

 

 

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Morons and A Fine Unpaid Job

5 Minute Read:

If you get too many men alone and leave us alone for a while, we kind of become morons.  —Andrew Yang, Businessman and 2020 Presidential Candidate

That’s a glib statement, with or without context. Yang can get away with saying it, but I can’t without sounding like a misandrist—which I’m not. My agreement with the sentiment is limited to this: there’s nothing at all wrong with the male perspective in the broad national discourse, but it needs to be tempered by other perspectives. That’s a fancy way of saying the U.S. could do with a bit* more diversity in the halls of power, and I know I’ve probably said so before on this blog.

Anyway, what Yang is saying is that too many guys in power for too long eventually leads to… well, what we have here in the U.S. I’ll drop the term; inequality. And I’ll say it out loud; because the (mostly) men in charge have become moronic by world standards, and are holding us back from being a truly great nation.

[W]e can […] start recognizing the work that women in particular do in our families and communities every day.
—Andrew Yang

You can check out the video of this interview here, and/or read the transcript. Yang was explaining the advantage of his UBI (Universal Basic Income) and arguing for including the work that mostly women do at home —caregiving, child-rearing, home maintenance, family finance, etc.—into the GDP. Kids who would flourish with parents whose labor is valued are the next generation of small business owners, teachers, farmers, drivers, retailers, medical professionals, and on and on—basically the backbone of America.

A Couple Questions

Am I paranoid if I entertain a loose theory that the last fifty years of wage stagnation is petty revenge for women entering and staying in the workforce? Shouldn’t women technically get paid more not less than men in the same positions since we mostly do more of the domestic busywork?

Of the hetero couples you know, how many of them really share the chores and domestic tasks equally, assuming they’re being candid about it?  I know it can be lopsided in gay couples too, but that’s a different conversation. I’m talking about straights as a way of highlighting those pesky traditional gender roles on this issue. If things are starting to even out and a lot of your straight friends share the chores, then our work here is done. *claps hands together in an up and down sweep But as long as there is still a disproportionate amount of gals coming home from work and starting second shift on dishes, laundry, and vacuuming, etc., we need to acknowledge the value of that labor, because somebody has to do it or it doesn’t get done. Somebody is doing it. Every. Day.

Is Yang’s UBI the answer? Maybe. It could help. Should we pay attention to what we’re teaching our little boys? Oh yes. Do we need to talk to our kids about the media messages they’re exposed to? Oh hell yes. It seems there are a lot of ways we can recognize the value of women’s contributions to society, and the first thing to do is to discover how badly under-recognized the background labor has been, and still is. Somebody is doing this work and doing a fine job of it. Every. Day.

 

 

 

*quite a bit more, and now

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What’s Your Writing Style?

1 Minute Read:

I’ve recently started writing news copy for a local paper, and it’s my first real foray into the Associated Press style guide. The point of AP style is, for obvious reasons, to be clean, consistent, and neutral in reporting events. It has always been important for news to be impartial. Reporters risk losing not only their credibility, but their access if they come off as biased in any way. I wouldn’t want to talk to a reporter if I thought she would twist my words, or characterize events in an inconsistent way. We are at a point in the American zeitgeist that the media’s credibility is being challenged pretty much daily by some of the people in charge, and it’s… problematic at the very least. It makes it difficult for the fourth estate to play their crucial role in keeping the general public up to speed on the events of the day, not to mention it’s downright dangerous for these people in a nation as armed as the U.S.

The Associated Press releases a new edition of their stylebook every year as language and technology evolve, making it necessary to issue updates. This year the editors paid a great deal of attention to race-related stories, setting some guidelines that will prove useful in the current social climate. A point that stands out is using the terms “racist” or “racism” when describing a person or an event. The style editors advise journos to instead use terms like “racially motivated” or “racially tinged,” to the frustration of people affected by racism. The frustration is understandable. We’ve all seen the tweets. Some news outlet posts a link to an article about a “racially charged” incident, and the wording seems wholly inadequate when people are getting shot because of the color of their skin, or accosted for being bi-lingual. I’m getting angry just writing this. And the comments come rollin’ in to the tune of “They oughta call it what it is, straight-up racism.”

The media has to stay impartial. But… the commenters don’t. That’s the beauty. You have a voice, use it. Write your story, or write a bunch of short stories. Blog it, journal it, serialize it, write open letters to the establishment. Share your story and find your style.

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Excerpt: Cascadia Park

2 Minute Read:

Rand flipped on the switch to the overhead light and one of the fluorescent tubes flickered and refused to light all the way. He flopped down in the chair and threw the stack on the desk. The letters splayed, and one of them caught his eye. He knew what it was by the return address and had no intention of opening it. He put his feet up on the desk and snatched a ball cap off the shelf behind him pulling it down over his eyes. He laced his fingers across his midsection and shut out the world.

***

 

Lily dragged a dining room stool out to the backyard where she’d already set up her watercolors on the plastic patio table. She clipped a canvas into her easel stand and sketched out a stone fountain with some birds and an almost grotesque version of their hedge that vanished into an exaggerated distance, and when she started filling in the colors, a pair of eyes appeared among the laurel leaves. The sky above the greenery was daytime blue but she graded and blended it to midnight indigo as it reached to the edge of the canvas. She’d included a full moon in the sketch and it mirrored the eyes in the shrubbery after she tinted them to match. She dabbed the three songbirds with gay colors, not particularly caring what kind of birds they might be, and she arranged them splashing and preening, oblivious to the concealed voyeur.

***

 

Early poked his head into the office and informed Rand that he was going to get some lunch. “Nice hat, man,” he added.
Rand moved slowly to pull the cap off his head and get to his feet while Early sneered at him. “Haven’t been sleeping much,” he said.
“Ah, sorry bud.”
Rand slipped out from behind the desk, one eye on the letter, brushed past Early and said, “I’ll hold down the fort. Get me a sandwich?”
“Yeah, you bet.”