“You’re not really engaged. If you were he would have come to talk to your parents about marrying you.” That’s what my mother said when I showed her my engagement ring. It was a Christmas Eve. One week later, on New Year’s Eve, I was married. Just him, me, two witnesses, and a judge in a cold courtroom. There was a blizzard that day…a portent of things to come?
My mother had actually liked the guy. A month before I got married, in an unusual conversation (unusual because we didn’t usually have conversations), she told me she liked him, adding, “All your other boyfriends until now were farts in the wind.” Hmmmm…that may have been, but that was a surprising remark. For one thing, she didn’t normally use the word “fart” in conversation. For another, she hadn’t met many of my boyfriends. Despite the strict rules that were enforced at our house, my parents seemed disinterested in the guys I dated. I know that as a teen, I’d had a few doozies that would’ve never gotten their approval.
Maybe my parents believed that by posting an early enough curfew, I wouldn’t have enough time to get in trouble. So when my mother was professing her great love for the boyfriend, she was unaware that I was pregnant and would be marrying him in a month.
When he and I sat down to tell them we were married, my mother threw a fit (after all, what would her friends think?) and then went to her room and refused to speak to me--the beginning of another long freeze-out. That was New Year’s Day. I stayed in their apartment that night, and the next morning my father had me pack up my stuff and he dropped me off at a mall with $10. (Technically, this was not abandonment.)
My father and younger brother were not “permitted” to have any contact with me. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I sent a few notes to my father’s office, and he responded, usually reiterating “…you know how your mother is.” What I was not getting was “how my father was.”
Good Morning, Bob! -- I get goose bumps from the similarities between our families. I wonder how it feels to hammer all this out through your blogging after all these years??? Blessings!
ReplyDeleteYou weren´t so appreciated by your mother as you should be?
ReplyDelete"…you know how your mother is." Bob, you and I both grew up in the 1950s, before Women's Liberation. The Feminine Mystique did not appear until 1963, and NOW didn't exist prior to 1966. Yet apparently in your family, as for sure in mine, the mother was the decision maker.
ReplyDeleteIt's a curious dynamic that not only speaks to the misnomer of women as "the weaker sex" but also says a great deal about men who so readily deferred to their wives.
No doubt there were many families where the father ran things, sometimes with an iron hand. Yet the stereotype (suggested somewhat by the 1948 cartoon illustrating your blog entry) of a henpecked husband was, throughout the 1950s, as American as apple pie. Why were so many men of that era submissive to a domineering wife?
Down through the years, I've often thought about this. But for the life of me, I cannot put myself in my dad's shoes and comprehend his mindset. It's a mystery to me.
Linda, it feels really strange. Not bad. But recalling some of these things reminds me what an absolutely fabulous life I now enjoy.
ReplyDeleteMattias, it's not a question of appreciation. My mother really should not have had children; she had no clue that 1) they weren't tiny adults; and 2) they had needs.
Alan,"decision-maker" is putting it mildly. I've often wondered about the submissiveness of American husbands in the fifties and sixties when men were still "kings of their castles." Do you think it has anything to do with WWII? Having fought the war, maybe they preferred to choose their battles...
Bob, I've heard that WW II theory before, but it doesn't apply in my case. Dad never served in the military. Besides, the USA was on the side of the angels in that war and emerged victorious. After soundly defeating the mighty Krauts and the devious Japs, returning veterans settled into an era of unprecedented prosperity. These guys had no reason to feel diffident.
ReplyDeleteSo why, in the privacy of their comfortable split-level suburban tract homes, did they cooperate in their own emasculation? And WTF was it about women who felt obliged to cut off hubby's balls? The whole scene was pathological, if you ask me. Like something out of MAD magazine, only without the humor.
Alan, those are good questions, and I'll bet tons of "experts" have written opinions addressing these issues. My WWII comment was just a guess. Besides the fact of the effects of their behavior on the men in their lives, these women--ironically--disempowered (is that a word? it is now)their own daughters who could only hope to grow up to be the bitches their mothers were--but they were too polite and well behaved and sensitive to ever follow in mom's footprints. Thus, a population of women who feel they must apologize for everything--even when someone else is trying to apologize to them.
ReplyDelete