Monday, December 9, 2013

Back Story Part I (Growing Up)

To understand why I'm interested in the subject of feminism despite the culture in which I live, we have to back up. 

I was a child of the 70s, then was a teen and came of age in the 80s.  When I was very young, my parents divorced.  I must have been a baby or toddler because I don't actually have any memories of them together.  My mom had primary custody of me.  It was just the two of us for a number of years, so she undoubtedly had an influence on my views on women and feminism.

She was a kid in the 50s and became an adult in the 60s.  She had always been a good student and she graduated early from high school.  But then she sort of floundered.  She had really wanted to be a veterinarian, but the only vet school in her state was at a public school that only admitted male students.  Her family did not have much money and out of state tuition was totally out of the cards. 

Eventually she got an English degree and fell into teaching.  It was either that or nursing for women with degrees back then.  But before finishing her degree, she married my dad.  She followed him around as he got his degree and started his career.  That slowed her own progress on finishing her education.  An early marriage ended up being a bad decision.  The marriage failed within a decade. 

My earliest memories were of just my mom and I living in a trailer park on the edge of a large Southern city.  She was a school teacher in a rural district.  On weekends, I remember my mom blaring the same records over and over.  She LOVED Tammy Wynette.  She alternated between "Stand By Your Man" and "D-I-V-O-R-C-E."  She also played Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" a lot.  These seemed to be her anthems. 

My mom eventually remarried.  The marriage meant we had to move to a new state.  Up until then, I got to stay with my dad every other weekend and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents.  The move meant I grew up isolated from my family.  My mom did not like the new town where we moved.  It was a lot colder, people were less friendly.  The urban traffic and hustle-bustle were more intense.  She hated it all and seemed pretty miserable a lot of the time. 

And moving also meant she gave up her career.  For years after the divorce, she had worked hard to earn her master's degree part time to become a librarian.  And a year or two before the move, she had been lucky enough to land a school librarian position.  Those were few and far between, but someone in her district had retired and she had beaten out the competition to land the spot.  She absolutely loved it.  She has always been an avid reader and loved being in charge of a library, encouraging kids to read.  When we moved, she was unable to get another library gig.  And she wasn't even able to get a teaching job because there was a glut of high school English teachers in our new area. 

She spent a year as a stay-at-home mom.  Initially, I was thrilled.  I'd be like everyone else with a mom who didn't work and was available to help at the school.  But things didn't work out as I expected.  My mom didn't know what to do with herself.  She'd go days without doing her hair and just wear knit hats with large pompoms on top.  She'd go on adult "field trips" organized by the local parks and recreation department, lose track of the time and be late picking me up, which was scary.  She cooked hot meals that didn't come in metal trays, but she has never been interested in domestic stuff so her cooking was a little odd.  She'd make this baked chicken dish with a black sauce.  It was actually pretty tasty, but it was so strange looking that I never wanted it served when I had a friend over.

Eventually, my mom realized that staying at home was not for her.  She needed the structure of a full-time job.  However, there weren't a lot of options.  She finally landed a job as a secretary.  Mid-thirties, master's degree, lots of professional experience.  And it was her freshman high school typing course that got her the job.  It probably hurt her feelings to start over like that, and not use her college education.  She was promoted over the years and towards the end of her second career she began to land positions with titles other than "administrative assistant."  Eventually, she had her own secretary.  However, she never made lots of money.  She worked in nonprofits where most of the work was done by women, though most of the bosses and the boards providing oversight were composed of men.

As far as I can recall, my mom never marched in any parades, but in her quieter way she definitely supported the women's movement.  Around the house, she would put up little cartoons about the struggle for women's rights, and if my step-father was un-PC and thoughtlessly used sexist language, he got a stare.  She was a fan of Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Geraldine Ferraro. 

Because she had had to start over professionally, my mom was often older than the other women she worked with.  Many were just starting out, and my mom seemed to be sort of a mentor to many of them.  I remember my mom telling my step-father about their problems.  They were young, smart women who had a lot of potential.  But it is hard for anyone to get their foot in the door and get out of the secretarial pool. 

And their love lives were a constant challenge.  Actually that seemed to be a bigger part of her mentoring than career matters.  None of them seemed able to find a suitable mate.  The men they met seemed to be adverse to commitment.  They wanted to just have fun.  At the time, Three's Company was one of my favorite shows.  The character Jack Tripper seemed to embody the type of men my mom's mentees were meeting.  And the comic strip Cathy was very popular. I think I grew up with the impression that young, smart women would find it difficult to get a man to commit.  Yet even before the term "biological time clock" was coined, my mom's mentees were worried about not finding a man before it was too late.  These were the days before professional women would even contemplate conceiving or adopting a child without a husband.  My mom's mentees wanted to "have it all" as we were always hearing in the media.  But without a man to cooperate, they wouldn't be able to have everything they wanted. 

Several of my mom's mentees did get married and have kids.  That made an impression on me too.  Some of them were well into their 30s when they got pregnant.  That was not easy.  Working full-time, long commutes, maintaining a home.  Many of these women had difficult pregnancies.  I remember being with my mom when we ran into one such woman at the grocery store.  She was by herself after work getting groceries for the week.  She was normally a very attractive woman, but that night she looked awful, was leaning on her grocery cart like she could barely take another step.  I remember being a little scared.  She said she was ok and we eventually went our own ways.  But in retrospect, I'm wondering why her husband couldn't have gone to the grocery store and let her rest.

I didn't have the happiest childhood.  I've surmised over the years that I was a surprise at a time in my parents' marriage when divorce was being contemplated.  My arrival may have put that off briefly.  But my mom has even admitted to me that she never wanted to be a mom.  She said she didn't think she'd be any good at it. 

My recollection of my childhood is that my mom never seemed very interested in me.  She never took an interest in my schooling.  Never asked about homework or helped me study.  She'd look at my report card when it came, but she never said much.  Fortunately, for the most part, I was a fairly decent student and self-sufficient.

I also don't remember my mom ever wanting to do anything with me.  I was an only child and was pretty lonely most of my childhood.  I played by myself in my room a lot.  When I was older, I spent a lot of time on the phone with my friends.  But when I was at home, no one seemed to pay me much attention or talk to me--unless they were yelling because they were mad at me. 

We rarely ate together as a family.  Once my mom went back to work, she sort of gave up on cooking.  She'd microwave a hot dog or something for me.  I'd eat it alone at the kitchen table most of the time.  We typically just ate together when we went out to eat.  As I got older, I was implicitly expected to fend for myself, though there were rarely many groceries in the kitchen.  I guess if you don't cook, you don't think about buying food.

The TV was constantly on at our house.  We were in the same room watching it sometimes.  But we also had TVs in our bedrooms, so sometimes we watched separately.  On the weekends, my mom liked to read or do crafts.  But she never involved me. 

Every summer I would spend part of my vacation with my dad and other relatives back home.  I remember a friend of the family telling me once that my mom got very sad when I left for those trips.  I was shocked and had trouble believing her.  My mom never seemed to notice I was around most of the year, I couldn't comprehend why she would mind when I was gone.  I guess I had always assumed that she was relieved to have me gone.  At least she wouldn't have to worry about childcare.

So, with this assembly of life experiences growing up, I had a strange view of the women's movement.  My mom supported it and had her own career ambitions. But she completely gave up a career she loved very much to move far away for a man.  The ethos of the 80s was "having it all," and I'm sure to my mom's mentees, she seemed to have it all.  But she was a disinterested parent.  She was nominally a mom, but rarely interacted with me. 

I suppose the result of all this was that I did believe that women should be equal in every way to men.  But I also grew up realizing that women had issues men did not.  Men could start families in their 40s and 50s.  Women could not.  Men seemed to have a large pool of spouse candidates, if they were ever interested in marriage.  Women on the other hand rarely seemed to find men who might be interested in getting married.

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I had never really experienced a happy home life, so marriage and children were not necessarily on my list of life ambitions.  I hadn't ruled it out, but it was not clearly on my list of goals.  As I was growing up, I wanted to travel and be a writer.  I wanted to speak foreign languages.  I wasn't terribly clear on how all this would translate into a career, but I knew I wanted to go to college.  I figured it would all fall into place from there.

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