Yes All Women
I remember my father’s hands, large and seemingly capable of anything, qualities I’ve come to associate with masculinity along with a deep unassuming soft voice and easy candor. He walked with a careful gait that favored his right knee and had specially made brown loafers for his flat feet. He smelled of Old Spice and the warm personal smell all older men have, something between soft new leather and sandalwood. I loved him, but he never wanted me. He was unreadable and moody, prone to days of tense silence that broke when his blue eyes softened and he would remind me I would do no better than him. I would drop out of high school, public education was wasted on me, and go work in the factory he’s been at for the past decade. I would become some man’s wife and disappear within him and the children he gave me.
My sense of self has been tempered by the men in my life, each carrying a personal hurt so deep my love couldn’t reach them. Whether it was failed dreams or lack of gumption it fell upon me like hot bile. Suddenly what they failed to see in themselves I suffered in tandem. I wasn’t allowed to exceed their limitations and my affection for them was supposed to be inexhaustible. I grew up in a delicate balance between chasing my passions and crippling indecision. While my worth was denied me from without, the final blow came from a small, hardened part of myself that always wondered — Were they right about me?
It’s a beautiful time I live in. I’m on the cusp of the kind of equality my mother wasn’t able to enjoy during her youth. The kind of misogyny I grew up with is no longer commonplace, but something that quietly resonates within few people who are incapable of change. In spite of my father, I earned the kind of education he was so focused on preventing me from having. I’m thankful for my mother’s sacrifices, supporting me in earning something she wasn’t able to pursue herself. She was the reason I became an avid reader and gave me a love for language and stories that will always be a fundamental part of who I am. Above all else, she never allowed me to forget my strength.
The world is unforgiving, my mother always told me, and there wasn’t room for weakness. She wanted me to be independent, educated and self-possessed in a way that isn’t common among most women. With my education I was meant to leave home, find myself a husband and start a family before I was thirty. I was meant to be matriarch of a small household while holding down a job with a greater financial return than she supported me on. I’ve done none of these things and have only barely begun to start my adult life. My mother forgot to tell me the kind of fierce independence she wanted me to have came with a price — I make people uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I’m left with my grit and an emptiness that can never be filled.
