I was looking at a very old black and white photograph from more than a hundred years ago that I found on the internet. It was of a small group of people, who looked like a pioneer family taking a rest in the midst of traveling. They were roughly dressed for the hard way they lived most everyday. Perhaps they were new in America traveling to a better life. An old women was sitting on a simple chair while the others were milling about or standing around as if in casual conversation. She was resting her chin on her hand and her elbow on her leg, the only one looking straight at the camera and I felt a connection to her. I began to fill in her thoughts with my own: Here we both sit pondering life. All the years I’ve lived have brought me here, to a time where the past and the future oppose each other. Uprooted. Again. No choice. The changes that come in life never seem to come from making a choice as much as from having no other choice. It has been this way for most women across time, across the globe. Men, children, land, food, water, sickness, forces beyond our control. Here we sit trying to understand why this happens to us. Can we bear the unbearable yet again? This was not the life I imagined and hoped for, not what was supposed to happen.
When you compare any woman’s life to that of women that came before her, the woman of now seems to have a better life, whenever now is. We are always living the impossible dreams and answered prayers of our fore-mothers. I can imagine all the prayers that were cried to God, the desperation a mother feels when her child is sick. Please, God, isn’t there some miraculous potion that will save my darling child? There will never be another child like as this one. Please. Let me take his suffering. But all the little graves tell us they were not healed.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a magic box that had within it the power to ….! When it is so hot, even Cleopatra did not have a way to make her palace as cool as my house. No way to talk to someone far away. No real image of a loved one’s face. A magic box that could keep food fresh inside. Even a King had to have musicians play for him if he wanted to hear music, but I can touch a magic box and music of any kind will play in my humble home or in my ears as I travel. Television … amazing! Even I never dreamed of the internet. We have a box that carries people and goods fifty miles in less than an hour, a box that can fly quickly across the ocean with people inside it. A box in the sky that sees the earth, weather is no longer a mystery. Another box that can fly to another planet and show us what it looks like there. Clean water to drink and indoor plumbing. Tea and salt cost pennies. Jewels are not rare. Magic boxes that cook food and do the work that servants used to do. What an impossible life we have. We must be so happy.
Loneliness seems too prevalent in my culture. I’ve been nomadic most of my life, but not by my choice. I’ve wondered what it would be like to always be surrounded by people who care about you as dearly as I do for my family and the friends I went to school with. Now they are scattered all over the continent. I had to start over in a new place so many times, and I’m basically shy, at some point it began to seem like a trauma to move away from the friends I had and another trauma to make new friends that I was sure I would lose with my next relocation. I miss my tribe. Generations of time and secrets have erased the knowledge of what happened to them and who they might be today.
My younger years were largely a struggle to have a life that would give me happy children, if nothing else, and a pleasant companion for me. For some reason I thought that men who became husbands wanted that too. Not the husbands in my life. I craved love and a soulful connection, but did not know, until far too late, that the endorphin bliss I felt when I looked into their eyes was not proof of true love. With my first husband, I was deep into dog brain: dancing, panting joy to be with him. Followed him like a puppy. He wasn’t looking for someone to feed but didn’t appear to mind my curling up beside him while he played his guitar or went on a road trip. Making music and the pursuit of his own perpetual bliss outweighed everything for him. If I could have been wise then, I would have seen that he was a perfect one of whatever he is. He needed to be solitary or someone else's dependent, not a father or husband. He is an ornamental.
The adventure of keeping his true self secret from us was what seemed to keep life burning for my second husband, the one that was most like my father. They both needed to have at least two personas to flip back and forth between. The self that had a wife, children and parents was suffocated by them. The secret, most exciting self, for both of them, traveled alone, drove a Jaguar, an MG or TR something, knew more than the bartender about liquor and wine, and knew what the lady at the end of the bar wanted.
I would minimized flaming character flaws in them and was totally unable to see my own. A thousand times I should have left. Leaving would have been the better choice, but I was paralyzed by pain, no where to take my children if I left and addicted to the brief moments of euphoria I felt when I thought I was loved. I thought loyalty was part of marriage so I was loyal. But after years of enduring bad behavior from both of my spouses it occurred to me that they might have both been thinking: "How bad do I have to treat her to get her to leave?" You would think that with all the choices we American women have now, that women in the past didn't have, and the women in so many parts of the world don't have, that we wouldn't make such messes of our time here on earth. Good luck to you future girls. I know you'll keep trying to make it better for the ones you love.
