The sexual revolution came out of growth in knowledge and control of the generational drive, making it possible for women to limit childbirth and change the dynamics of families. Accompanied by the shift of most people from rural life, attachment to small farms and towns, to the city, these changes evoked a whole new set of values and strategies. My parents exemplified the transition, which deeply affected their children's lives, partly causing them to resist children of their own.
The plan on my father's side was for each of the sibs to have two children. The accidental third child in my set meant an economic burden that was finally lifted by my mother's entry into the workforce of teaching. My father's fealty to rural communities meant that his job was serving rural people, which meant travel. Both parents thought they were city folk, sophisticated and knowledgeable. My father maintained his illusions through books and magazines. My mother took up the political role of a PTA leader, which led to teaching. Both held on to rural ways of assuming a "family business" even as my brothers and I left them through peace time military service and me through access to a national university, Northwestern, which was considered higher status.
My father's sibs scattered, one brother going to Southern California to manage lung damage, one brother becoming an airline pilot, and the sister and her family making a sociological jump by building a house across the West Hills from Portland proper. My mother's sibs, the Pinkerton girls, married Hatfield boys down at the southern end of the Willamette Valley. As the Hatfield patriarch told his boys, "Pinkerton girls are smart and work hard. Get one." The Hatfield boys continued to ranch and did well. Military service took one to the city. One of the Pinkerton girls, a nurse, did military service but came back, traumatized and content to live quietly.
What I'm leading up to is family dissension. My mother said that her childhood was a verbal war at every breakfast because of differences between her parents, her father the Pinkerton from a branch of his family that were not detectives but rather builders who happened upon the boom in dairy business that required big barns. When all the barns were built, less work meant less money. They turned to raising small fruits and orchards. But it was painful. This pairing meant the wife was more sophisticated than her volatile husband.
My mother's mother was a Cochrane, a family that did very well in the fertile valley, but she had terrible teeth and for one year was sent to Portland with the help of church connections, in order for her mouth to be redesigned. She acquired a taste for the big city. The breakfast wars were over making money and being sophisticated. Because both partners thought in Victorian rural terms of breeding and WWI terms of nation, the accusations were not about economics but about breeding. And about opportunities and compensations in the big city of Portland, which my mother believed. But she was a woman of determination and refused to allow breakfast wars, so instead that refusal hid behind its back resentment at not being more "successful" and involved. The looming ghost of sociological resentment was invisibly real, controlling the decisions of my brothers and I.
Somehow we all became convinced that achievement was dangerous, though we had a taste for it. We'd do well, start on the track to stardom, and sputter into safe low profiles. Part of it was that our parents didn't have contacts and skills they could give us: their whole life strategy was always to get a secure job and hang onto it like bulldogs. As time went spinning on its way, the nation moved to a gig economy and corporations owned both rural and urban life. All my cousins on my father's side dispersed across the continent. The Pinkerton/Hatfield coalitions held but were somewhat limited by ancient English understandings of life, like primogeniture and the drive to acquire and keep land ownership. The accident of one marital pair having boys and the other pair only having girls was at the heart of their wars. In the last years of his life my younger brother took refuge with them, uneasily.
The concussions that we now take seriously affected both my father who was in a head-on car crash in 1948 that changed his personality, eroding it until his relatively early death, and my younger brother who fell and cracked his head on pavement, which took him out of the workforce in his forties. The other brother had evaded romantic liasons but broke his leg and married the woman who moved in to take care of him. She was divorced with a son. Their low-key conservative liason worked. I think it was peaceful.
So my own life has been divided by a split between conventional marriage and an atypical and romantic arts life that required making big money (bronze casting is far more expensive that painting) and entered a new split between the post-WWII culture of heroism and prosperity celebrated in the boom of Cowboy-and-Indian stories, realistically portrayed, and a new ironic progressivism, wanting to "get behind" the stories. I refused to have children as a source of oppression and physical endangerment. But I could never quite understand how to "rise to the top", or even how to develop my best talent, writing which came out of a reading childhood because of my parents. I wanted out of the status quo, out of fast track urban life, out of middle-class standards left over from Britain and war. I wanted both rural and urban.
There have been passages when I took any job I could. I was never subject to major sickness or damage. I was stubborn about being reliable, not complaining about work that was "beneath" me, staying aware and informed, but I never was able to build a writing habit or to understand how to market writing, though my aunt the poet knew how to do these things in a quiet way and tried to help me. I gradually came to understand that I wasn't like anyone else in the family, didn't share their "values," and couldn't expect them to understand what I was doing, much less thinking about.
The strange thing about theology is that it's supposed to be a "people's knowledge", blameless and basic because of faith, which in fact it is not. Instead it is more rarified and dependent on the past than any science or math. To "really know" theology is to be separated from the mainstream. But it is considered virtuous. It was a perfect escape from meaninglessness because it showed that meaning is constructed instead of inherited and possibly contentious world views. It's a discipline well acquainted with schism, belligerence, and transformation. Vital for writing.
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