So I'm reading Nuala O'Faolain's new memoir, Almost There, which is a follow-up to the well-received and (deservedly) popular Are You Somebody? (which Egret loaned me, and which I must get a copy of for myself). (Listen to her here.) When I read the first one, I was struck by the inimitably Irish way in which she tells her story. There's a sense of rambling to it that you think is never going to tie together somehow, but which, amazingly, does: an ability I both admire and envy in storytellers, and one I've seen also in Ciaran Carson (and to a far more annoying extent in Joyce) in both Fishing for Amber and Last Night's Fun. Stories and experience are woven together, not necessarily recounted linearly, which is really how we live them. Every event in our lives influences every other event—or at least the way we interpret them—no matter how separated by linear time they are. It's a great technique that I'm not sure can be learned, at least not later in life. I think one might have to grow up hearing stories recounted in this way to understand how it works enough to keep control of it. Emilie seems to do it naturally but she finds writing a huge chore and I don't think she has much sense of herself telling her stories this way. I'm not sure it's a voice I could write in, or a technique I could master, which makes me admire it all the more.
O'Faolain's in her sixties now, near retirement age, and has never married, which is, I suppose, another reason I relate to her. She's about 20 years older than I am, but I see myself heading down the same track, if not with the same number of failed relationships or one-night-stands behind me that she has. There are other significant differences between us, besides our age and country of origin and sexual history: religion (she's nominally Catholic), family size (she comes from a large one), and her overall attitude (I think I'm much happier than she is, and more optimistic), but there's enough similarity in our situations that I feel a sense of kinship with her. One of the main themes in both books is how hard it is to be a woman alone in modern society (as if it's ever been easy), and the older I get, the more worrisome this becomes, as it has for her. "In our culture," she says, ". . . it has been shouted at us for so long that we're second-rate if we're not in a pair with someone else, that we've come to deeply believe it."
While I would like to think this is less true for the generation following mine, the second wave of feminists, I don't think that pressure has resolved itself, if Bridget Jones' Diary is any indication of the culture's mood. I've never had marriage as a goal for myself, though there were a couple of individuals I thought I could see going into that kind of a relationship with, so I admit I don't fully understand the urge or the need. Regardless of how one arrives at it, being single is a state that gets little respect and O'Faolain points this out in a particular painful incident that broadsided me on the train as I read it:
One of the cruelest things ever said to me was by someone who meant to be kind: "You are a wonderful woman," he said, "and you've made a lot of yourself. But who knows what you might have been if you'd had someone behind you?" And that's the thing that haunts—the sense that there is more within than you've had a chance to use, and that you could be more alive, more joyous, more adventurous, more talented, more loving, if only there were someone who wanted to bring the whole of you out and see it at play.
What left me gaping at this paragraph was the assumption that O'Faolain's swallowed that she's somehow less than whole without a partner. She really does seem to believe that she's "second-rate" without someone else. This strikes me as very sad. While I agree that someone who loves you can (and should) bring out the best of you and support you in your goals, from my observations of my friends' marriages, I find this is less true than it should be. As often as not, I feel as if my friends have been diminished by marriage, or held back by the person they're married to, stuck less in compromise than in the surrender of their own dreams and ambitions and ideas for those of their partner's.
It's not just that having children shifts their focus either, though it does. In a way, that's entirely different because it's usually a conscious choice now that birth control is readily available. It's still not quite right that it's women that decision affects most, and I don't mean just in the giving birth part. Because of the way our child-unfriendly society is structured, most of the burden of childcare still falls on women. That's something that should have changed long ago, keeping pace with the way it works in Europe. Having children often just adds an extra lock on a door that's already been closed.
And it's more than just a conflict between the reality of living with someone and the theories of how feminism should change one's life. There's a terribly funny illustration of this contrast in a book I picked up in London the second time I was there, called Letters from a Faint Hearted Feminist, by Jill Tweedie. It's ironic that one of the things she said in 1993 before she died was "Assumptions about women are what has changed most radically. And a woman's whole psychic energy isn't wrapped up in men or nurturing the male ego. Young women don't appreciate that vast liberation." I agree that younger women don't appreciate how much things have changed, but many older women often don't realize how little things have changed, too. We're still struggling with the mindset that we grew up with.
As I was writing this, I got an e-mail from an old friend of mine who was something of a mentor and role model when I was a kid. Peg was a feminist in our religion when it really wasn't acceptable at all, i.e., when it wasn' t even acknowledged that women were often treated differently, condescended to, or unfairly ignored; at the time, I think her husband supported her in it, as well. The official attitude has changed now, somewhat, but there's still a skittery sense that self-avowed feminists are trying to usurp men's authority, when what it really means is that we don't want to be treated like children or idiots, incapable of independent thought or reason, a rejection of the Miltonian "He for God only and she for God in him" sensibility. Peg and I have taken different roads now and though the forward she sent me was a reminder of what women went through to get the right to vote (a right I don't exercise myself because of my religion and because I think it only encourages the bastards), there's a grim reminder woven through it of the costs of independent female thought:
It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy. The doctor admonished the men:”Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”
Or evil. I had a disagreement about whether one could be both a feminist and a Christian woman with another friend recently, who sounded to me more like she was trying to convince herself, or was repeating her husband's words, than that she sincerely believed herself what she was saying to me. One of the things that sparked the disagreement was my mention of the magazine Bitch as one of my favorites. Silly me, I neglected to mention the subtitle, "Feminist Responses to Pop Culture,"—not that it would have made much difference, I think. There's always the danger that when you examine the status quo too closely, that you might not like what you see. Then what do you do? I got the sense that she was afraid to challenge her own viewpoints and that my writing here was making her do that. Anyway, that disagreement's been in the back of my mind for while now and coupling it with the above passage from O'Faolain's book just lit something in me.
Maybe this is a mistaken impression I have, but I feel as though many of my friends stifle themselves for the sake of peace in the relationship, and compromise their own sense of self. One of my Mom's old friends got remarried recently, after years of living happily as an independent widow. Patsy has always been fun and vivacious and full of energy even in her 60's. Now she's run ragged taking care of her husband, who's had half a dozen hip replacements because he won't take care of himself. On top of this, and it seems a small thing, but he's made her stop dying her hair, something she's always done. She doesn't look or act much like the woman I used to know and I wonder how much being remarried has changed her own self-image.
I've seen so many of my friends change drastically from when I knew them in college or grad school once they got married, and not necessarily in good ways. I haven't seen most of them grow. In fact, many of them seem to have shrunk, to have given up thinking and asking questions, and poking and prodding at their own lives, as though that time in college had merely been a phase in their life when they were trying on those shoes, rather than looking to build a new wardrobe of responses and thought patterns they could carry with them. One I think actually dropped me as a friend because her husband said she was so unruly after I came to visit.
Maybe it's just that I have more time to think than they do. God knows making a relationship work is time consuming, and having children definitely is. I get the sense that it's just too much of a struggle to be a whole individual inside a relationship, rather than just letting the other person's opinions and desires replace and subsume yours. I'm not sure if it works this way in lesbian relationships too or not, but it seems common in heterosexual ones. And that's one thing I've always been terrified of: having someone else subsume me, whether in a friendship or a romantic relationship. The best of them, as O'Faolain says, should make you more yourself, not less. Sadly, I think that's a small percentage of them.
I'm not sure there's a solution to this except consciousness raising all around. We're so heavily invested as a society in not treating women like whole persons that I'm not sure that struggle is human winnable. Certainly not in my lifetime. In the meanwhile, my personal solution is not to sacrifice my own identity, even it means making other people uncomfortable. What that means in terms of relationships right now is that I don't have one. Maybe that solution will change if and when I end up in one. We'll see.
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