Day Thirty One

The last day. I remember my first year doing this, I wrote an essay on the last day about what it felt to do this marathon. Today is something similar. I have thought a lot about the project, about the world situation, and I put it down in words. So tonight, here is what I am thinking.

A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

Here it is, the final day of March. Another Women’s History Month has come and gone, this one barely noticed. I almost missed it, because I wasn’t hearing anything about it from anyone. I did miss International Women’s Day; I didn’t realize it until the day was over…for two days.

It isn’t that people usually do a lot for the month, or for the day, but there are usually at least some voices crying out to be heard, and with my usual search patterns and the sort of sites I visit, I would usually be aware. All we got this year was the sound of one hand clapping.

It was more difficult to finish out the month than it has been in the past. The first year was tough, but that was because I opened a lot of wounds, used a lot of truly personal stuff. Now I’m used to it, having done it for several years, and while it still sometimes feels like rubbing salt on wounds, I’m able to get through without tears…not that I’m the crying sort, but there are some things that can make anyone cry.

I think the main reason it was so tough to get through is that I get the feeling no one is listening. The first couple of years, the manager of the blog would give me updates and how many visitors to the site, but since I get the feeling he no longer visits the site, I have no idea if anyone is there at all. I feel that way about a lot of things, actually. So many people hear words, but don’t process the things they are saying. They don’t want to hear how rough minority groups have it, or the problems of women, because they feel helpless to do anything about them.

I took on this project in the hopes I could do something about them, but I realize it is a futile hope. The effort needed to resolve the problems of women is going to take a massive tectonic shift in societal attitudes, a shake-up so immense the ground will move, and will never go back together. Patriarchal attitudes are burned into our society…into every society…and for a lot of people, it isn’t worth the work to change. A lot of people don’t want to change; they like things the way they are.

In addition, we have the kings of the patriarchy remaking the US government, and removing women from the institutions. Their assault on the idea of diversity, of equality, includes removing mentions of women, people of color, Native Americans, those with different sexual orientations, and the disabled from the history of the country. They don’t want to hear about our contributions to building the country, which are myriad. They don’t want to hear about the oppressions that kept us from contributing even more for so long. They don’t want to hear about unpaid labor, either on the part of women or the part of Africans sold into slavery, Africans who left behind descendants who are still here today. For the kings of the patriarchy, putting your fingers in your ears and saying ‘I can’t hear you’ is an effective strategy. Why? Because they have enough power to ensure that they never have to see anyone or anything they don’t want to see.

I don’t focus on all the other groups who are harmed by the various policies, because this is meant to be about women. One of the worst problems the woman’s movement has is mission creep, trying to be all things to all people. I do try to acknowledge the intersections of multiple oppressions; I have some intersections myself, and understand that being in more than one group can be more than the sum of their parts. But I need to focus on women for this, and besides, there are people of color who are much more eloquent about their situation than I could be. There are Native Americans who are doing a wonderful job telling their story. The same with the disabled, and those with different sexual orientations. So I will focus on women…that’s where my expertise lies. I do sometimes reference some of the disabilities I am experienced with, as that is part of my story.

Doing this project all these years has taken a toll. How could it not? When I first started, we were in the first Trump administration; I mined that for material for my stories. When Trump was defeated, I breathed with relief; he was gone. Unfortunately, like a good zombie, he returns. He won’t stay away. Now because of his judges, we lost abortion. Because of his administration, we are losing even our own history. We must fight back, but we are exhausted. We are discouraged…worse than that, we are disheartened.

I often feel like there is no place for me, no place for my kind. What is my kind? Quirky, to be sure. Scientific minded, with an artistic…not soul, I don’t believe in those…an artistic essence, perhaps. I don’t fit easily into boxes. No one I know fits easily into boxes, but it’s possible that’s because I hang out with other quirky people. Or maybe there just aren’t boxes the right size and shape for anyone. I do know one thing, though, one thing that has remained constant throughout my life: I am a woman.

Being a woman has shaped my destiny. It has left my mind a seething mass of contradictions; growing up in the Baby Boomer generation, it was difficult to navigate the rapidly changing society where you would get conflicting messages, sometimes in the same paragraph, the same sentence. “I am woman, hear me roar.” “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan.” “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Messages assaulted us, day and night, telling us we could have it all, until one day we finally realized that to have it all, we had to do it all. No wonder we’re exhausted.

I can’t tell you the date, or exactly where I was, but I do remember when it hit me: I couldn’t have it all. No one could. Men didn’t have it all, and they didn’t do it all. They had a piece of the pie that was larger than ours, but they didn’t have it all. A man who wanted to be an airline pilot might end up as a McDonald’s manager, because the opportunity never presented, or because he wasn’t good enough at math. He might want to marry a beautiful supermodel, but in all likelihood he married a woman who was…whatever she was. There are few supermodels in the world; men have to settle for someone else.

That moment was so freeing for me. I’m not going to say I quit trying to do it all or achieve what I thought I should, because things are never that easy for me. I manage to complicate my life until it looks like I’ve been playing Twister®. What it did for me was give me a thing…maybe sort of like a mantra…that I could repeat whenever I got myself into a spot where I was trying to be everything to everyone. I really can’t do that. No one can. But the messages that told me I had to be pleasant all the time, that I had to have a spotless house and make sure my husband’s shirts didn’t have ring around the collar, that I had to be so many things…and do it all while working nine to five…those messages are still there. I have managed to clear my mind of some of them, but most of them are embedded so deep I may never get them out. I continued to dance backwards and in high heels (not literally; I gave up high heels in my late twenties).

To circle back to where this digression began…that is the same thing that has happened with society. We have absorbed so many messages about the roles of women, the roles of men, that we create situations that reinforce those expectations, often without realizing we’re doing it. The stereotypes run deep through our society, and the resentments of those men who feel they were displaced by women joining them are both deep and on the surface. It doesn’t take much to spark their anger at women who don’t ‘know their place’.

Changing society seems like an impossible task, but it can be done. At one time, it was considered quite moral to own other people, to make slaves of people who didn’t look like us. Few would accept that now; the opposite position is the moral one today. At one time, it was considered immoral to allow women to vote, but we have now been voting for more than a hundred years. It was once considered moral to kidnap native children and educate them in white man’s schools; now we are learning the history of that awful time, and few of us can hear it without cringing.

Times do change; they just don’t do it quickly. It took a long time for slavery to disappear, and it took a major, bloody war between people who had a lot more in common than they had different. It took women three generations to win the vote, and a lot of women were arrested and treated like murderers just for asking. It took decades of work and visibility to get to a point where gay men felt safe walking hand in hand down a city street. None of it comes quickly, and there are always speed bumps on the road.

I am trying to think of the current situation as a speed bump. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to visualize it that way. We are currently living through it, and the darkness seems complete. When we do see a light at the end of the tunnel, we worry it might be an oncoming train. To say it is a speed bump seems to trivialize the seriousness of the current global situation.

With all this, it might be understandable if I was heading toward saying I was wrapping it up, shutting it down forever. It might be that I should. That isn’t something I can do. When I make a vow, I follow through. When I say I am going to write, I write, even when my heart isn’t in it, even when I have no reason to think anyone is reading it, even when my spirits are so low I can barely move. So if we are all still here next year, I will be back, shouting in the wilderness, hoping someday someone hears. Until then, sayonara. Au revoir. TTFN.