When I was working on leaving JH, I stumbled somewhere upon an article about Betty Friedan and her book, The Feminine Mystique. I had heard the title passed around before that article, but I always thought the term referred to a woman's sexual appeal. I'd never really thought about it or looked into it. From that article though, I learned that The Feminine Mystique is a book that reshaped the way women operated within American society. I picked up the book around Christmas and I positively devoured it.
The term itself is used to lend words to what Friedan calls "the problem that has no name." The problem, in essence, was the general unrest being experienced by women in the early 60's that was often marked by alcoholism, extramarital affairs, and use of Mother's little helpers. The gist is that these were a new kind of women: college-educated, but expected to do nothing with their brains besides endless housework, bridge games, and perhaps the occasional PTA event. The general message from every point in society at that time, from the Dick Van Dyke Show, from Redbook, from Margaret Mead and even from their own psychoanalysts was that a woman should be complete and whole and happy being a wife and mother. If she tried her own career, she was placing undue burden on her husband and children by not fitting into her "role." And if she wasn't happy, well then there must be something wrong with her. In the book, Friedan dissects all the backstory behind that message, why it's wrong, and what we can do to change it.
Here in the 21st century, you 20- or 30-something women may think this doesn't apply to you. Newsflash though, I see this crap from my friends all the time. In fact, it applied directly to me. Play along and you'll see what I mean.
For a long time, my MySpace page said something like "I define myself through other people." Truer words were never spoken. In fact, I think the whole reason I got myself into that wake-up-one-day-and-hate-my-life predicament was that I was defining myself through other people. I was never one of those girls that plan their weddings when they're twelve or anything, but there really was an amorphous, abstract part of my brain that thought I would be happy once I was married to JH. In fact, there was an amorphous, abstract part of my brain that made me believe there was something wrong with me because our relationship didn't leave me feeling complete and whole and happy. Hmmm... I put my dreams and goals on hold to help advance him toward his career goals, so that he might someday become a doctor and support me, and then I would work on my goals and dreams. Then I'd be happy. Hmmm....
I won't get into a saucy bitchfest over why I decided he couldn't be a part of my completeness equation, I'll just say that somewhere along the way I dissected a sentence:
I am happy.
The first word? I. Who is that? This I? What am I? If I strip away my mom, I am no longer N's daughter. If I strip away my dad, I am no longer a girl whose dad killed himself. If I strip away my sister, I have nobody to copycat. If I strip away JH, I am nobody's girlfriend. If I strip away my friends, my job, my cats, my hobbies, my red hair dye, my wardrobe, even my skin... Who am I? How do I know I am happy if I don't even know who I am?
(I know that's a circular line of questioning. Just play along, please. You know what I'm driving at.)
I read this other book, called Smart Women Finish Rich, which is a pretty good read if you're a self-help book junkie like me, or if money baffles you. Anyway, in that book, there's this exercise in which you write down your values. How do you know what your values are? "If you had all the time and the money in the world, what would you do?" It's the same question. Take it all away. Everything. What do you do? How do you define yourself? Give yourself everything you ever thought you could want, and then nothing else matters but who you are. What do you do? How do you define yourself then?
The answer, of course, is different for everyone, and it's not always as easy as you might think to come up with that answer. I'm still working on mine, of course; that's one of the reasons I blog. That and towels. But I think I'm getting somewhere. Living alone for the first time...that definitely helps.
Living in a place like New York? Perfect! You're automatically stripped. Nobody knows who you are or where you came from, and they're too busy to care. You can be anybody you want to be, and define yourself however you want. There's no such thing as a preconceived notion of a stranger in a city with 2 million people. Sure, we make them up, but that doesn't mean we're surprised when we find out we were wrong.
As for you, LM, I know that New Orleans is a much smaller town and that you don't have the luxury of anonymity like I do, but that's really not necessary. All you have to do is strip the other stuff away...what are you then? What do you want? What are your dreams? What would you do if you had already done it all? Moving out of your house, that's on the right track, for sure. Moving to another city? I highly recommend it, if only for the experience (grad school in New York!), but it's important to do what you think is right for you. And as for the boys, fuggedaboudit! You gotta be you, whoever the hell that is, and you gotta let them be them. The rest will come.
And as for the rest of you... Go figure it out!
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