Not a Possession

 

Reflecting back many times over 40 years ago today. Norman, my now deceased husband took me for a hike on a late Friday afternoon to propose. After about 1.5 miles up the mountain,  he'd picked a fallen tree and asked me to sit eye to eye with him. We were equals even in the proposal.

Then he'd popped the question,  "Would you like to be my equal partner in marriage?" He'd asked. I was taken completely off guard. Yet I knew to say, "Yes." I'd paused for a second in disbelief. He went to ask a second time. Our words converged. My "Yes", won out. Soon, we were married.

Oddly enough I'd sworn off marriage nearly all my life until Norman. Too, any intimacy with anyone. The thoughts of marriage and love ebbed and flowed tauntingly till that moment. 

My parents had a horrible marriage. Women were mere possessions in my family. Many an ogre and some rapists ruled them. The rapist had a devout Catholic wife that had gone to the priests to cure him. It never worked. Then they'd said, 'Ahhh haaaaa!' That it was alcoholism as the problem that made a man rape little girls. I call that out as Bullshit.

I was fortunate there. I'd get the creepies. That feeling someone is evil. My husband asked me that a few times. Like how did I know someone was a bigot or evil. I told him, "I shook their hand I felt it." Now, I can feel a victim, and conversely the evil of a rapist as I enter a room. One is devastating and one is unsettled rage.

My mother had asked me the same question when I was aged eleven. I replied, "I was next to him, when I was four. He was animated (phony essence). I didn't trust it. I pulled Don's (my older brother's) shirt and said, there's cookies downstairs. Let's go. From then on, I knew not to be near him even in a crowded room. Because who's going to believe a little girl?" It was because I'd known by aged four no one spoke about it. I already knew I was going to be a second class citizen. I decided, that no, I would not be. That was my gift.

In the family I'd come from, girls were not allowed to speak at the dinner table and children were to be seen and not heard.  What an absolute miserable fucking time and place to be a girl and a woman. I decided early on that I would not be a possession. I wanted independence. The beauty was, if I was going to be married, I'd be married to a man who was a feminist before I knew I was a feminist as well.

The man who's father was born in 1921, a World War II veteran and a Jew at first glance didn't appear to be a feminist or even close, and yet he sort of was. He championed my long-distance running. He marveled at it. My father-in-law was far from being athletic. He'd survived a glider crash during the war, he was one of the three survivors of the crew of thirteen men who'd survived it.

Dad/Herbie was a democrat. He accepted too that I was a Marine. He and I had some long talks in his office as he'd take a rest inbetween his accounting business. He believed a woman's work was hard. I knew this without him saying so. I watched and listened to how he'd analyze things at the dinner table. Everyone had a say. Jokes were told by anyone. Serious conversation and debate was held. We'd laugh and argue together. Then clear the table together. Yes. The men cleared the table and told Mom to relax.

If there had been a few dishes in the sink beforehand and Herbie finished his work, he was in the kitchen washing the dishes for his wife or my husband would be. Norman was the youngest of three children.
Hilariously,  the man I would marry would at times when I'd be cooking ask, "Can I help?" I did all I could not to laugh and say. Honey, I love you. You make a good egg and a mean French toast; however, you can't cook. I'd refrained because it was an innocent, fair question and it was filled with innocence and honesty.

Funny this morning as I was planning on reading another ten pages of Rich Perlstein's 'Nixonland'. I'm reading about how white men fucked a nation, then attempted to self-regulate the fucking of a nation. Only to more recently blatantly in plain sight fuck the nation and encourage fucking women openly. Raping as they openly state they are our protectors. Taking away women's rights in front of us as some rapists on our Supreme Court now rule. Which by the way, ain't so supreme. A few need to be imprisoned.

All this, rendered by mostly white men fearing handing over a little power to us little women. Yeah, I'm small but my rage packs a fucking punch. I've had rage before I was raped at age 28 by a stranger thinking I was the woman who turned him down for a date. Too, he could've stopped the beating, abduction and rape of me when he'd realized I wasn't her on that warm, sunny day. But he knew that no man would stop what he wanted to steal. A life. Yes, rape is murder. And until we address it as such, the raping of girls and women will continue and increase.

By the way, a man heard me being beaten, and raped then, and said he'd heard nothing. I saw the light go on in his upstairs bathroom he admitted he'd been in at the time of the attack when police questioned him afterwards. The bathroom was able to be seen from the woods I was being raped in. Yet, the two women in the house heard my yells too and delayed their coming forward on such till two weeks after the attack. Those women were further away from the attack than the man had been in the house and yet they heard me. These two women said they thought it was a domestic affair and they didn’t want to get involved. I'll give you a snarky teenaged response. "Seriously?" Eye roll included.---Jody-Lynn Reicher