I was born the year The Feminine Mystique was published.
My mom was a college student/artist/bohemian, and my dad was almost the same sans bohemian. He was more of a barbarian (his own view, voiced many times over with a chuckle).
They raised me to be me. To follow my path, to explore my life, to make mistakes, to succeed, to love, to embrace, to know that no matter what, the key was getting up after a fall and just moving on.
I watched my friends living much more conservative and traditional American lives at that point, that is to say that they were living a consumer-driven version of the American Dream. Cooked up by the media, and our reaction to the horrors of WWII.
While observing the differences between my life and my friends', I often felt conspicuously different, like a wild child growing up in Victorian England.
We ate homemade whole grain bread. We had chickens (in the middle of the city, that lived in a frame/stucco chicken coop my Dad had built that was better constructed than our own home), ate fresh eggs every morning for breakfast, and, occasionally, a fresh chicken.
We had a garden to rival Eden, wherein my parents employed French Intensive cultivation techniques incorporating compost and deep deep digging to enrich the soil and net amazing results. We had lots and lots of really great produce, and ate it until it came out our ears, then we canned and froze and dried for the winter months. Mother Earth News was the one publication to which we subscribed, and every issue was read and reread until it was completely dog earred and fit only for a trip to the compost pile, where it would eventually become part of another crop.
We had no TV. My parents we adamant about this. They believed that TV monopolized attention, minimized creativity, and became a crutch on which a person would lean in lieu of pursuing more interesting and worthwhile interests like reading voraciously or roller skating or playing baseball or listening to music or engaging in a stimulating conversation or just being....and they were abso.lutely right. I resented it at the time, though. Boy did I. But I read every single book on our jammed bookcases, from science fiction to Time Life series, to anthropology textbooks or modern culture treatises by Toffler and such. And there was Hemingway and Philip Jose Farmer and Homer and John Irving and John Nichols and James Michener and more, so I was never ever bored. I also managed to exhaust the entire literature section of my elementary school's library by the end of 4th grade. I read a.lot.
My Dad taught me to split wood for our stoves (big black wood burning Franklin style stoves), how to shoot a pistol (he believed we all need to have this skill), how to work on our cars (we always had second hand vehicles that often required maintenance and/or full on repair), how to play darts, to appreciate jazz, shoot pool, use a mitre saw, develop film (he was the curator of exhibits at a local museum and was in charge of all of the photography), to properly shine shoes, to burp like a sailor (which made my mother cringe, of course), and other life skills.
In the summers when we'd go on vacation we'd pick up a ginormous stack of comic books to take with us, then read them all over the course of the vaca. We camped a lot by a gorgeous river up in Southern Colorado, and would sit at the table, late afternoon sun shining through the trees, river churning by, and read those comic books. We loved Marvel, Mad Magazine, The Hulk, The Green Lantern, Daredevil, Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four, E-Man, you name it-we read it. And it never occurred to me that I couldn't don a cape ala Superman or Wonder Woman (although we both thought she was a little weak for our taste..we preferred the more masculine antics to hers) and do whatever I wanted to.
My Mom insisted on pursuing her own interests while raising me, which meant finishing up her college education, developing her artistic abilities, folk dancing, etc. She was an ideal example of a whole human being parenting. While I was the center of her life in many ways, she never ever stopped developing and evolving and reaching for her own personal growth. She was an avid fisherwoman, in fact still is, and hauled me along on no end of expeditions to find the perfect trout, usually while trailing along next to a small stream (New Mexico isn't known for its copious water and we always headed North, which meant smaller but scenic areas, usually). She could fly fish or spin cast, and taught me both. And how to tie flies as well. And we camped. Rain or shine, we'd persevere.
Together she and my dad and I would cook amazing meals, sit out on the porch late on summer nights and talk philosophy and love and ecology and astronomy and of the foibles of being human.
I would look at my middle class friends who ate Wonder Bread and shopped at J. C. Penney's and I was often envious. Of their ordered, sterile, vanilla, normal lives. We always want we don't have, and as children really feel any differences that exist.
On Thanksgiving, some years, when my friends were with their families enjoying a traditional feast, we'd go to Navajo Lake and gig kokonee salmon. Sometimes in the snow. Then we'd sit around a fire at night, warding off the extreme cold while eating smores and telling fishing tales. And I usually managed to melt something, a shoe, the back of my coat...I always got a little too close, so ended up with a mangled remnant of an item I'd overheated.
Life was interesting and never dull, though it took me years to realize I was highly entertained while I was growing up in this rather offbeat lifestyle.
Naturally I rebelled. I registered to vote as a Republican to pacify my grandfather and vex my liberal parents. Their view felt so outdated and provincial to me at the tender young age of 18 that I simply let the pendulum take me to the far end of the swing. Where I stayed for almost two decades before snapping back into myself and realizing the error of my ways. I voted for Clinton, though, it was the first time I crossed party lines. But then I officially changed my party for voting purposes and felt much better about things.
But never, during any of this, did it occur to me that I as a woman was any different than the men I worked with. I just never saw it, never felt it. And I certainly didn't rush into reproducing more of me. That didn't even appear as a viable alternative until I'd been out in the world for quite awhile.
Clearly I was delusional in only the way an only child of hippie intellectuals with rose colored glasses could be, I suppose, but what was, was.
Many years have passed since my opting to become a Republican, and many personal choices have been made. I have personally benefited from the work of Planned Parenthood, and have always felt female reproductive rights were just that, our very own rights to manage our bodies, and consequently our lives, as we saw fit. I grew up after Roe v Wade, and never feared my options should it ever come to that.
But recently, as we've all seen in the furor of budget battles, it's clear that female rights, reproductive or other, aren't valued and protected by all. There is very conservative, very agenda-driven sector pushing for cuts where cuts cannot be made without wreaking untold havoc on the health and well being of women and men alike.
My Son, the most zealous gender rights advocate in the family, is changing my view. He's opening my eyes in ways they've needed to be opened, and providing me a nice basis on which to build my future volunteer work.
He's also igniting a passion in me for an issue I'd never really voiced. I've been extraordinarily fortunate to raise a family with a partner who was raised by a very strong, capable, well-educated and nurturing woman. Which means we both do what it takes to make things works. Always. It's never been a gender thing, only a practical thing. Which is rare. And special.
See, I can't abide by destructive stupidity and injustice such as that dealt by uptight, upper class, religiously oppressed politicians. Did I leave anything out there?
I hope not. Because while the gender equality war has waged for decades, there is clearly work to be done to ensure that more progress occurs, that no rights that have been won will be lost, and that the evolution of equality can begin to address some of the issues which currently exist as a result of the progress that has been made.
I am in. And I cannot wait to open my big mouth for a cause that represents something so fundamental, so necessary, that not protecting it is unconscionable to me now.
Another one for the Son, huh?
My mom was a college student/artist/bohemian, and my dad was almost the same sans bohemian. He was more of a barbarian (his own view, voiced many times over with a chuckle).
They raised me to be me. To follow my path, to explore my life, to make mistakes, to succeed, to love, to embrace, to know that no matter what, the key was getting up after a fall and just moving on.
I watched my friends living much more conservative and traditional American lives at that point, that is to say that they were living a consumer-driven version of the American Dream. Cooked up by the media, and our reaction to the horrors of WWII.
While observing the differences between my life and my friends', I often felt conspicuously different, like a wild child growing up in Victorian England.
We ate homemade whole grain bread. We had chickens (in the middle of the city, that lived in a frame/stucco chicken coop my Dad had built that was better constructed than our own home), ate fresh eggs every morning for breakfast, and, occasionally, a fresh chicken.
We had a garden to rival Eden, wherein my parents employed French Intensive cultivation techniques incorporating compost and deep deep digging to enrich the soil and net amazing results. We had lots and lots of really great produce, and ate it until it came out our ears, then we canned and froze and dried for the winter months. Mother Earth News was the one publication to which we subscribed, and every issue was read and reread until it was completely dog earred and fit only for a trip to the compost pile, where it would eventually become part of another crop.
We had no TV. My parents we adamant about this. They believed that TV monopolized attention, minimized creativity, and became a crutch on which a person would lean in lieu of pursuing more interesting and worthwhile interests like reading voraciously or roller skating or playing baseball or listening to music or engaging in a stimulating conversation or just being....and they were abso.lutely right. I resented it at the time, though. Boy did I. But I read every single book on our jammed bookcases, from science fiction to Time Life series, to anthropology textbooks or modern culture treatises by Toffler and such. And there was Hemingway and Philip Jose Farmer and Homer and John Irving and John Nichols and James Michener and more, so I was never ever bored. I also managed to exhaust the entire literature section of my elementary school's library by the end of 4th grade. I read a.lot.
My Dad taught me to split wood for our stoves (big black wood burning Franklin style stoves), how to shoot a pistol (he believed we all need to have this skill), how to work on our cars (we always had second hand vehicles that often required maintenance and/or full on repair), how to play darts, to appreciate jazz, shoot pool, use a mitre saw, develop film (he was the curator of exhibits at a local museum and was in charge of all of the photography), to properly shine shoes, to burp like a sailor (which made my mother cringe, of course), and other life skills.
In the summers when we'd go on vacation we'd pick up a ginormous stack of comic books to take with us, then read them all over the course of the vaca. We camped a lot by a gorgeous river up in Southern Colorado, and would sit at the table, late afternoon sun shining through the trees, river churning by, and read those comic books. We loved Marvel, Mad Magazine, The Hulk, The Green Lantern, Daredevil, Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four, E-Man, you name it-we read it. And it never occurred to me that I couldn't don a cape ala Superman or Wonder Woman (although we both thought she was a little weak for our taste..we preferred the more masculine antics to hers) and do whatever I wanted to.
My Mom insisted on pursuing her own interests while raising me, which meant finishing up her college education, developing her artistic abilities, folk dancing, etc. She was an ideal example of a whole human being parenting. While I was the center of her life in many ways, she never ever stopped developing and evolving and reaching for her own personal growth. She was an avid fisherwoman, in fact still is, and hauled me along on no end of expeditions to find the perfect trout, usually while trailing along next to a small stream (New Mexico isn't known for its copious water and we always headed North, which meant smaller but scenic areas, usually). She could fly fish or spin cast, and taught me both. And how to tie flies as well. And we camped. Rain or shine, we'd persevere.
Together she and my dad and I would cook amazing meals, sit out on the porch late on summer nights and talk philosophy and love and ecology and astronomy and of the foibles of being human.
I would look at my middle class friends who ate Wonder Bread and shopped at J. C. Penney's and I was often envious. Of their ordered, sterile, vanilla, normal lives. We always want we don't have, and as children really feel any differences that exist.
On Thanksgiving, some years, when my friends were with their families enjoying a traditional feast, we'd go to Navajo Lake and gig kokonee salmon. Sometimes in the snow. Then we'd sit around a fire at night, warding off the extreme cold while eating smores and telling fishing tales. And I usually managed to melt something, a shoe, the back of my coat...I always got a little too close, so ended up with a mangled remnant of an item I'd overheated.
Life was interesting and never dull, though it took me years to realize I was highly entertained while I was growing up in this rather offbeat lifestyle.
Naturally I rebelled. I registered to vote as a Republican to pacify my grandfather and vex my liberal parents. Their view felt so outdated and provincial to me at the tender young age of 18 that I simply let the pendulum take me to the far end of the swing. Where I stayed for almost two decades before snapping back into myself and realizing the error of my ways. I voted for Clinton, though, it was the first time I crossed party lines. But then I officially changed my party for voting purposes and felt much better about things.
But never, during any of this, did it occur to me that I as a woman was any different than the men I worked with. I just never saw it, never felt it. And I certainly didn't rush into reproducing more of me. That didn't even appear as a viable alternative until I'd been out in the world for quite awhile.
Clearly I was delusional in only the way an only child of hippie intellectuals with rose colored glasses could be, I suppose, but what was, was.
Many years have passed since my opting to become a Republican, and many personal choices have been made. I have personally benefited from the work of Planned Parenthood, and have always felt female reproductive rights were just that, our very own rights to manage our bodies, and consequently our lives, as we saw fit. I grew up after Roe v Wade, and never feared my options should it ever come to that.
But recently, as we've all seen in the furor of budget battles, it's clear that female rights, reproductive or other, aren't valued and protected by all. There is very conservative, very agenda-driven sector pushing for cuts where cuts cannot be made without wreaking untold havoc on the health and well being of women and men alike.
My Son, the most zealous gender rights advocate in the family, is changing my view. He's opening my eyes in ways they've needed to be opened, and providing me a nice basis on which to build my future volunteer work.
He's also igniting a passion in me for an issue I'd never really voiced. I've been extraordinarily fortunate to raise a family with a partner who was raised by a very strong, capable, well-educated and nurturing woman. Which means we both do what it takes to make things works. Always. It's never been a gender thing, only a practical thing. Which is rare. And special.
See, I can't abide by destructive stupidity and injustice such as that dealt by uptight, upper class, religiously oppressed politicians. Did I leave anything out there?
I hope not. Because while the gender equality war has waged for decades, there is clearly work to be done to ensure that more progress occurs, that no rights that have been won will be lost, and that the evolution of equality can begin to address some of the issues which currently exist as a result of the progress that has been made.
I am in. And I cannot wait to open my big mouth for a cause that represents something so fundamental, so necessary, that not protecting it is unconscionable to me now.
Another one for the Son, huh?
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