THE SADDER BUT WISER WOMAN

Since I passed into middle age, which roughly corresponded with me assuming the professional role of a minister, I have accepted friendship from men my age or slightly younger who aspire to success as authors.  They assume that since I write but am only a woman and therefore not a competitor, I will help them.  I haven’t looked for them or expected them, but they’re mostly welcome if they act as equals and don’t assume I’m more than I am.  There’s only been one who was a far better writer than I am.  I learned a lot.

So I say (quite honestly) I’m a tubby, scruffy, aging, low-income woman who lives in a decrepit house in a small village next to a reservation, whose respect for teaching is gone, whose five years in animal control were a watershed, who is not nearly institutional enough to be a minister, and who now just wants to write -- to hell with publishing, to hell with being an expert, to hell with everything except running words through my keyboard as though they were silk, with an occasional section of twine or steel chain.  Or thread.  Never a space where there are no words.  A concert pianist told me that if he stops practicing daily, his hands crave the keyboard.  Like that.

Some don’t get it, never get TO that.  They want the cowboy hat without those pesky smelly cattle.  Sometimes they are hoping that I might know how to go about achieving a higher consciousness.  Something beyond classes, reading books.  They never think of looking at their own lives.  They never count their ghostly sacred cows.  They never do their 100,000 hours of practice.  That’s okay.  I no longer feel any impulse to guide or teach or save them.  So I flip ‘em off.  Most just wander away at that point.

There’s another reaction, often from those of whom I have become fond, but without sexual content.  They want me to be more of a success, to wear a fur coat instead of an old cloth parka, to have a CEO job, to write a best-seller book, and to be an all-around glamorous creature.  Even Bob Scriver had that impulse which was more legitimate (and sexy) since we were married.  Part of that is to be the carrier of the husband’s status, visibly demonstrating that he can attract a high status woman.  That was understandable but mostly just irritating until his former sister-in-law showed up: so petite, so French, so high-heeled, such skillful maquillage -- such glamour.  TOTALLY unable to live in Browning, to work in a chaotic shop, or to live on a budget.  The code of the mistress, not the partner wife.  

Men with tough moms who survived in a hostile world, with the help of family but without the inseminator, insist that their sons pull their own weight and the sons do.  But these moms never express “need” for their sons, never use weakness to manipulate them, never yearn to guarantee their own value in the world by being someone’s mother.  They rarely need rescuing -- if ever.  In fact, the mom sometimes rescues her child.

My mother was a little like that; she didn’t make any demands on her sons, but on me, her only daughter.  Maybe that’s why I don’t like the pattern.  She expected me to achieve, but not to be better than she was.  In fact, my aspirations to ministry or writing were labeled selfishness and being too big for my britches.  We were women who wore britches, so men could soar.  Enablers.  But the men were the ones supposed to be brilliant, even if they neither protected nor provided.  If there’s not even sex, where’s the reward?

The issue is ALWAYS fundamentally survival.  Success is a strategy for survival and culture status is a definition of success.  I call this into question because I lived through the success arc as a “secondary,” a Tonto/Sancho Panza/Pancho/Bat Boy, in the Sixties.  Does that really work?   Does it justify my present attitude, which is “sod success”?  

Someone has said that an artist has about a decade of truly productive and growing “upward” trajectory.  After that, with luck, things level off.  With bad luck, the arc turns down, sometimes quite suddenly.   The Icarus template.  I joined Bob as his success was just arriving, rose high until the success began to tear him apart physically and emotionally, and then a short slant down with many opportunists riding his back -- not his coattails.  They wanted barebacking.  They wanted blood.  By then he had thrown me off. 

But I had my reward.  He said that instead of him paying me alimony I ought to be paying him tuition, and he was right.  But I WAS paying as I learned.  The customers had become more important and therefore more demanding, more competitive, less able to appreciate the art work for what it was.  The guys (rarely women and never the guys who worked in the shop and foundry) kicked me out of the way, yet Bob depended on me to be the independent witness who could tell him honestly what was going on.  Except now he didn’t want to hear it.  I have to fight against repeating this cycle.  It’s in both the culture and myself.

I threw in my cards.

There is an archetype, confused, maybe Jungian, that persists.  Belinda, the good witch in Oz; the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio; the mother in “A.I.”  Some will say the Virgin Mary.  Many women aspire to inhabit that model of tender compassion.  We should not discard it nor belittle it.  Either a wife or a mistress can act this out -- but not the woman who wants a separate life.  If she goes against her inner forces, maybe she could take oxytocin pills, but more likely oxycontin.  One needs to be a little supernatural, or at least highly spiritual.

It’s not fair or human to make this role seem unworthy or evil.  Too many of us need Echo, Ariadne, Eurydice, and Kuan Yin. Some theorize that this is a deeply constructed image of the young mother who comforts, feeds, sings us to sleep, and then is lost to time.  She is unattainable, like a mermaid or a nymph who becomes a tree.  I’ve always been intrigued by “Vera” a character in the Prime Suspect series 3 (the one about rent boys) played brilliantly by Peter Capaldi.  He’s not just a female impersonator but an “embodiment” of heartbroken compassion.  There must be men who are figures of male solace.  Of course, Biblical angels are always male.  But they can’t be homosexual if the other party is not human, can they?  And surely an angel is not a beast, despite the wings.

The artist's name is Gorgidas.  www.redbubble.com

Chivalry and courtly love are lost in recent times.  (We would do better to discard the Furies.  We try.)  So now I’m beginning to read Denis de Rougemont’s “Love in the Western World,” which is about Tristan rather than Jesus.  (Or can Tristan BE Jesus?)