MOTHERING

Lucy Pinkerton Strachan, my mother, about the age I am now.

One of the unexpected benefits of ministry, esp. the UU’s, is that they are an upscale educated bunch who sit there on Sunday morning and watch you closely. In Fellowships, which are too small to hire a full-time minister and meet wherever they can, they may be sitting only six feet away. At coffee hour after the service they will tell you what they deduced — for free. One was a speech therapist who gave me advice about voice strain. One would stand behind me during coffee hour and coach me to accept praise gracefully. The men almost always gave me driving tips since I was circuit-riding.

One very astute feminist psychologist said to me, cocking her head a little on one side, “I’ve figured it out. You married your mother.” I had never made it a secret that I’d married a sculptor 25 years older than myself, that it was true love, but it couldn’t go on because he wanted me to be an assistant-him. Not a free-standing me. I remember screaming at my mother on tiptoe, “I am a free and independent individual !”

The payoff for my love affair was partly physical comforting. My mother was not a huggy/kissy person. When I accomplished something at school — which I did often because I tried so hard — my parents were very proud. Of themselves for being my parents. So I was used to that part, but I craved embracing — you know, unconditional positive regard.

Me and Bob

One of my older friends (89) thinks it’s a great accomplishment on my part that I married Bob. He was shocked when one of his friends his age from Browning said he thought Bob treated me like a slave. There was a payoff — I stayed a child until a year or so after the divorce. All decisions made for me. Bills paid. Safety guaranteed. Until I was into my thirties.

What the feminist therapist somehow saw or deduced was that I spent my life courting my mother without any results. I’d buy her a little present, make her a little compliment, try to please and flatter her — and all the time I’d be defying, escaping, secretly living a covert life. It wasn’t anything sinful. I was just mine. My relationship to my husband was exactly the same. Neither of them ever suspected that they didn’t know me at all.

Bruce Strachan, my father,  after a head-on car collision

His concussion was shrugged off but the damage changed him.

If anyone tried to get close enough to figure this out, I’d run. My fear was two-fold: that my mother would invade me and try to snuff anything she didn’t like or that she’d desert me, discard me. She was strong and determined. Maybe this was why my father was a traveling man. But then I understood that after a concussion in 1948 he was no longer normal and she had to compensate. No one in her generation divorced. EVER.

The relationship with Bob was well-established by the time I married. There were two or three reasons for legalizing. The school froze my salary (along with six other teachers) because we were lovers. (They were really after the others but couldn’t figure out how to exempt me. They accepted me and Bob.) I didn’t quit for another year, but by then I realized that I was putting in a second day’s work after school and beginning to wear out. I began to threaten to leave and even his mother knew it would be a loss. For both of us.

A strong reason for marriage was that my mother always told me no one would ever want to marry me. Unless I did what she said. I thought the price was too high, but I believed what she said. Of course, Bob didn’t really want to marry me — just to own me, which means that she was right. Everything is always definitions. But finally I realized that she had always been told no one would marry her. She had been thirty and enjoying single life. But Roseburg is a small town and she knew there were real cities where life was more exciting. Marriage would take her to Portland.

The little ranch where I wintered over.

The struggle to reconcile myself with Bob was so intense that I began to worry that I’d go crazy and maybe I did. After the divorce I stayed out at our little ranch on Two Medicine all by myself except for cats and horses. That didn’t “heal” me so much as it enlightened me. Bob picked up the tab for everything, including lawyers and groceries, and didn’t bug me about it.

I wanted graduate school. I didn’t know about Unitarian ministry and had no idea about how to become a writer, my real goal. So I thought in terms of clinical psych. Statistics classes were a rude shock. All the time I was at NU on the north end of Chicago, I’d cast my eyes on the south end where the U of Chicago was. Not that I wanted to leave NU. I wanted both. When the UU ministry offered a springboard, I jumped. Bob was proud of me. As though I were his daughter. But I have no desire to marry again. I have no grasp of the concept, nor did I understand ministry really, but it was good preparation for writing.

I think about motherhood and this is where my colony of feral cats comes in handy, since they are constantly performing the biological fact, and present considerable tension with circumstances. First of all, there are too many kittens and after much internal debate I resorted to a country custom, which is drowning newborns. I use warm water and sing to them, then weep a bit. I don’t enjoy it.

The Granny MamaCat in her youth, Smudge, and a kitten who died with no name.

I didn't kill this kitten -- it just disappeared.  The town owl maybe.

But the cats figured it out. Now they give birth away from here and don’t come back until the kits are walking. My murder-impulse is not strong enough to be fatal to them. I should not feed them, but I do. I even warm them in deep winter. This town is awash in cats. The animal control man in the adjacent county says it’s because of leash law — dogs used to kill the extra cats. I have no money for spaying, even if I could catch them. The Granny Mamacat is ferocious — no vet could deal with her if she were conscious and I have no way to knock her out.

The two cherished and protected cats that I acquired when I thought I was teaching have aged out and been put to sleep. I miss them, so I didn’t resist very much when two new cats pushed into the house. The Granny Mamacat’s runt, Smudge, took her remaining kitten (I missed it.) under a pile of windfall branches I save for firewood and raised it in that cold and hard but safe place. That was the Dust Bunny, or now just Bunny, formerly feral female, mentally a little “off.” Finnegan, at first known as the Martian or the Weirdo, arrived as a half-grown kitten from next door and Bunny fell madly in love with him. He showed her how to be domestic.

Forward from a friend who entitled it "The HORROR"

Then Finnegan disappeared just as Bunny became sexual. She had four babies in my bed at my side with me reassuring her. She is so off-key emotionally and narrow skeletally that I thought she might not manage.  She had four babies.  I destroyed two, meaning to leave two, but she took them under the house and back in between the floor joists where I couldn’t even see them. She was her typical clumsy self, carrying them by one back leg instead of their napes — them screaming horribly all the way.

Recently I heard peeping in the crawl space and captured two walking kittens. At the moment they are romping, scaling, chewing, and generally tearing up the peapatch in the house. Bunny goes in and out the cat flap but is more interested in food than anything else, calling for her babies to come nurse or nagging me for tuna fish. She doesn’t lick her babies much. I read an article about rat intelligence, which is closely related to how much their mothers lick them. So I supplemented by stroking, which they don’t much appreciate and makes them pee.

A baby "least weasel"

Mammals as newborns need to have their anuses licked by their mothers in order to move their bowels. I learned this the hard way in the Sixties when we had a baby “least weasel”. (Kids brought us what they caught and Bob paid them a little.) The tiny thing was my responsibility, though I didn’t really know what I was doing — no internet, no vet, no book. I kept it warm, fed it with a tiny bottle, but didn’t know to activate evacuation. It died clearly suffering. One of my long list of painful guilts. This is one of the ways I see motherhood — from the mother’s point of view. And it is mostly biological. I find it helpful. But sorrowful.

I love these tiny kittens: Tux (black with white bib) and Doux (softly gray) and even the irresponsible Bunny. Biological, this love. Which means greater effort for the rational to address.

"TRAINING FOR AWARENESS, RESILIENCE AND ACTION": A Handbook for Depressed Kids

(This is a bit of a side-bar for the five Domain discussion I've been pursuing.)

TARA is the acronym for addressing problems of adolescence based on the RDoC approach of brain pathways rather than labeling and sorting using the Diagnostic labels.  That is, reconciling assumptions about clinical issues with what is known about the brain from neurology research. These thoughts (TARA's are the ones in italics) are meant for all kids, but esp. for troubled kids.  Is there such a thing as an untroubled kid?  Anyway, the goal is a handbook which should be published soon.

Training for Awareness, Resilience and Action

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4137278/

“Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the current leading causes of disability worldwide. Adolescence is a vulnerable period for the onset of depression, with MDD affecting 8–20% of all youth. Traditional treatment methods have not been sufficiently effective to slow the increasing prevalence of adolescent depression. We therefore propose a new model for the treatment of adolescent depression – Training for Awareness, Resilience, and Action (TARA) – that is based on current understanding of developmental and depression neurobiology. The TARA model is aligned with the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) of the National Institute of Mental Health. . .

“Approximately 13–20% of the children living in the United States experience a psychiatric disorder often including depressive disorders, with suicide being the second leading cause of death among US children aged 12–17 years in 2010 (Perou et al., 2013)”

Studying brain systems is complicated by development, which is the main characteristic of adolescents, and offers many chances for something to not-get-done/do-too-much/go-entirely-missing.  Three special considerations are understanding the causes, predicting what will happen, and figuring out what to do about it.

Brain systems often evolve from the pre-existing substrate “animal” or limbic impulses by imposing new restraints rather adding something novel.  Maturation can mean "wait now!"  The internal restraints that are not yet in place for adolescents may include those on impulsivity, risk-taking, novelty-seeking, increased emotional intensity and reactivity.  These impulses are naturally present in most mammals and are vital to the exploration of behavior that expands cultures.  A young animal that will not risk doesn't learn to hunt or find a new range.  It stays in place, dependent on adults for food.  In other words, it's "domesticated," an aberration good for the people who "own" them.  It's close to depression IMHO.

The benefit of risk goes to the survival of the culture rather than that of the individual, since a percentage of individuals (8–20% ?) can be sacrificed without destroying  the larger group.  The reality is that in every population, human or not, some individuals are going to be lost.  The culture wants it to be the children of the Other, not them.  

These are the principles of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.  Thus, high school students work hard to be excellent football players so they will earn scholarships to good schools where they will destroy each other's brains by bashing into each other.  But many of the players will be ghetto kids who will flunk out anyway, after making a lot of money for the institution of higher learning.  Pencil-necked mild kids will make it all the way to post-grad and earn the big salaries the ghetto kids only imagined.  They are domesticated and will donate generously to their Alma Maters. They are likely to struggle with depression IMHO.

Since human mental restraints are located in the prefrontal cortex, damage to the forehead and other frontal areas may delay or eliminate some of the regulatory capacity.  This is the age of reconciliation between the need to belong to a peer-group, and also the need for autonomy.  Many little neurological structures that control emotion, ruminating (going obsessively over and over one’s experience), and other processes that can become depression vortexes, are just maturing and settling their internal interaction with each other.  Raw cognition is not so much a problem as figuring out how to put it together.  The specifics of this stuff is well or at least thoroughly described in the document linked at the beginning.

Survivor.

The other side of the equation is that developing youngsters are still plastic enough to compensate in major ways, if they have enough of what they need and some shelter.

The concept of anhedonia comes up often and seems to be less about inability to accept pleasure -- the origin of the term -- than about emptiness which doesn’t come from boredom so much as from feeling hopeless, pathologically lonely, and isolated.  “There’s nothing to do, this place hates me, I can’t wait to escape.”  They may refuse all awards, honors and praise as attempts to control or as just lies.  I see this around here, both on the rez and off, and it is also clear in the “Bridgend” movie.  This is where S-R breaks down for adolescents.

Here is a list of red flags for depression:

1. Sustained threat with symptoms of anxious arousal, increased conflict detection, attentional bias to threat and emotion-laden stimuli, helplessness behavior, punishment sensitivity and avoidance.

2. Arousal and wakefulness including limbic and autonomic hyperarousal with manifestations such as insomnia and secondary sleep dependent behavioral dysfunctions.

3. Loss, including feelings of sadness, guilt, shame, low self-esteem, worry, rumination, increased self-focus, and withdrawal.

4. Attention and cognitive control with concentration difficulties, distractibility, and low impulse control.

5. Approach motivation, mechanisms of reward learning and social processes such as social communication, perception and understanding self and others and self knowledge are valuable salutogenic life skills which should be addressed in treatment of adolescent depression.  [WTF is "salutogenic"?  Does it mean you're the Salutatorian?"]

These are the children of prostitutes in India who were taught by a female photographer to use cameras which made them all very happy and positive.  Not all of them were able to leave the brothel community.  A few won prizes and traveled.

This is a list of functions to address.  

They’re mostly “mindfulness” learning.  “Mindfulness” is a range of techniques for “being here now,” for increasing awareness of one’s own internal life in the normally unconscious part of the brain and responding body.  The team working on TARA likes yoga, but there are “disciplines” (the restrictive sound of the word is unfortunate) in every culture that respond to this approach from “walking meditation,” to retreats, but the Asian traditions (Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist) have honored them the most.

1. Improve autonomic regulation and decreased hyper-arousal and limbic hyper-reactivity (with hypothesized secondary effects on sleep disturbances).  Unconscious stuff, but habits can be built consciously.

2. Practice attention and interoceptive (internal signals) awareness to enhance dynamic switching away from self-evaluative processing and rumination.  Suffering, danger, hunger, forced labor, abuse and unwanted sex are all imposed experience that destroy this awareness as a way of protecting the self.  It will take assurance of safety to do this.  

When I've been in groups that were intense, the counselor would sometimes say to someone:  "What are you feeling right now?"  Sometimes they didn't know.  Sometimes they realized something surprising, not what they had thought.

3. Promote emotion recognition by training interoceptive awareness (emotion) and enhance prefrontal cortical regulation of affect by practicing labeling and communication of emotions.  It can be a shock and confusion to begin “feeling” without ways to think about feeling.

4. Train top-down cognitive control over affective responses such as negatively biased states of attention, processing, thinking, memory, rumination, and dysfunctional attitudes.  These are dashboard skills: seeing the speedometer needle go up and being able to take one’s foot off the gas.  (Simply braking may not be the answer.)

5. Identify intrinsic values to drive pro-social behavior and increase motivation for committed behavioral activation.  This moves the attention out of the person and into the culture, but in a supported way.

To repeat in slightly different language:

1.  Calm down and create a sense of safety.  Learn how to match detection of danger to reality.  To respond too little is to be vulnerable, but to respond too much is damaging.

2.  Attend to and care about inner experience.   Build your emotional dashboard.

3.  Recognize, regulate and communicate emotions.  Calm the limbic, clarify the pre-frontal thoughts.  

4.  Core values, goal setting and committed action -- connecting the cortico-limbic with the thoughtful pre-frontal processes.

COMMENTS:

I hardly qualify to reflect personally on this material myself since I’ve handled my unconscious mostly by stuffing it down and putting my effort into the rational, often by writing, which many kids do online now.  One risks others reading what was tentative and exploratory, and freaking out -- trying to take over and impose order or THEIR answers.  

Here is a metaphor.  The only way to learn how to drive on ice -- short of a skid-pad -- is to find a safely frozen pond or parking lot (shallow enough to keep from drowning if you break through) and cut cookies, slam brakes, etc.  In actual practice on real ice you are risking a roll-over.  Good to have someone standing by, even when exploring one’s own guts.  As the Brits say, “Take advice.”  

If early versions of humans had evolved as naturally rational beings, with onset of sexuality delayed until full maturity, we would not have an overpopulation problem.  They might be always waiting for just the right moment to fall in love, which means risking children without the skid-pad of marriage.  See how dangerous metaphors are?  

Anyway, it’s inaccurate to think that sexual feelings are only present in teens.  It’s like saying that eating is only important at one stage of life.  The survival basics are always present.  The problem is not eliminating them, but managing them in an authentic way.

MARRIAGE IS A STRING OF PEARLS

Marriage is a like a string of pearls, matched or graduated, real or cultivated or imitation, in various shades, some more baroque than round.   And now the string has broken and the pearls are rolling every which way.  This is such a “twee” metaphor that I hesitate to work from it, but there have been worse, so I’ll keep going.  The thing to remember is that the elements (pearls) of this category are complex and the string is not the same from one example to another.

Let’s name the pearls -- try anyway:

• True love  (whatever that is)
• Sexual access
•  The conception of children
•  A cultural institution for raising children
•  A family contract made on behalf of children
•  An economic deal to support the family as defined by the culture
• A complex of conventions about what a family is

• A unique arrangement of persons living together that is called a family for lack of a better name

• A religious concept (meaning a culturally endorsed and imaged idea) that might require: 

• Two different genders (leaving ambiguous or mixed genders unaddressed)

• Or “races” (again leaving mixtures out and not defining “race” except for being people who are different)

• Or requiring fertility (sterility can be a deal-breaker)

• Or allowing delegation of  sexual or reproductive obligations to someone else (slave, servant, harem, temple whore) 

• Or might specify how many wives or husbands can be allowed 

freshwater baroque pearls

• Or might defend the right of any person to transcend convention 

• Or might even allow the marriage of people who have been dead for a long time

•   A way of continuing a generation-to-generation sequence of relationships that preserves those relationships.

•   A way of keeping together wealth and land occupation

•  Mutual protection: a small version of tribe which may have been the precipitating group that gathered around a major figure.  A tribe must contend with these marriage/genetic families as divisions within.

•  A governmental category given some privileges like tax breaks and recorded in a central registry for reference and identity purposes.

cultured pearls

•  A legal category imposing restrictions, obligations, privileges.

•  A medical category implying genetic derivations and granting consent for procedures and responsibility for care.

•   An indicator of status

Just married

A lot of other stuff that is too unique to describe and probably not stable enough to stay put as a category anyway.

In response to that -- or maybe in confirmation of that -- is a whole book:

“Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage.

“In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change “drifters” into “planners.” In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts “planners,” who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with “drifters,” who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States.”

So basically the idea is that there is not enough socially accepted definitions for people to maintain marriage or even practice it in some stable way.  This is partly because of the breaking up of binary definitions of sex -- it is now possible to “be” something besides a husband/wife -- mommie/daddy.  “Career,” “adventure,” “success” interfere with the formation of the bonded family that will support children.  Bonding = bondage.  Now no one has your back -- if you didn’t have parents who did that, you won’t even know it’s possible.  

The economic situation is quite comparable to the bait-and-switch story of the vulnerable state of individuals who are not coping.  We shut down the warehouses for the crazy by promising small neighborhood imitation families who would shelter those people -- but they didn’t.  The money wasn’t there.  The warehouses were reinstituted in the jails.  Likewise, the idea was that a woman would have the same income as a man and therefore would not need to depend upon a spouse.  Instead women are still paid two-thirds of male wages, still shut out of really lucrative jobs, and yet are still stuck with the kids.  The idea that the pill would mean only wanted children was about as effective as the idea that pills would mean no more crazy people.

I wondered when we’d get around to defining marriage through the perspective of children instead of just sex or bonding desire (which is NOT the same as sex, though it can start out that way).  Margaret Mead always says our marriage licensing should have two steps:  one a renewable contract between consenting adults that defined their economic and other obligations to each other, esp. concerning property ownership.  If that went well and the couple (ignoring gender but not accommodating threesomes) wished to make the twenty-year commitment to a child, then a new license would be necessary.  It would only be revocable by the state on grounds of incompetence, unfitness, and the like -- whatever endangered the child.  

BUT such a double-decker system would only work if there were a decent way of caring for children who were outside families, either because the government removed them or because they just got thrown out.  The trouble is that people go right on making babies and the babies go right on loving their caregivers, no matter how unfit or ill-equipped they might be.  And institutional child-raising has always been a rotten idea.  

pearl divers

The first problem has always been economic.  In times and societies where resources are scarce and what is thought to be necessities cost dearly, the nations contract into tribes, the tribes contract into defensive families, and the families fail to form or break up under the weight.  Kids must shift for themselves however they can.  Like every other natural spectrum, some of them will be able to manage and a high proportion will simply die, but there will be a middle category of “bent” kids, like grass grown under a board where it survives by sacrificing sunlight.  

Eugene O'Neill

Very soon damaged kids grow into damaged adults -- not necessarily predators but unable to respond in ways that don’t damage themselves, others, or the system that the government is trying to enforce.  Sentimentality (which passes for religion in some circles) holds up the ideal of family in the way it has been defined in the past: Norman Rockwell -- not Eugene O’Neill.  So what was it that held together the Eugene O’Neill aggregations of drunks, addicts, violent people, full of pride and blame?  Was it that a known evil is always better than an unknown evil?  Is it that they knew that without the minimal shelter of the house, they would die in the brush or the alleys?  Was it Irish pride in defying the neighbors?  

I don’t know.  I’m a solitary.  No leftovers, no hitch-hikers.  A small town is my loose family.  I follow along at the edge of the Blackfeet tribe.  But I live an examined life and that is much of what sustains me.  I avoid alcohol, drugs, careless relationships because they keep me from thinking.  (Reading and writing are only expressions of thinking.)  It's not a virtue: it's a coping mechanism.  Writing and only writing would be a mistake if I didn’t have such a huge cache of experience behind me, though the part that was “family” was never sustained.  That is, I have dived for pearls, but then I gave them away.  No regrets.  No strings.  Stories.

THE MARRIAGE QUANDARY

An institution is nothing but an organized version of a paradigm, a set of culture concepts that people more or less assume to be true and so insist on.  As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, when the paradigm stops working, people stop believing in it.  The institutional paradigm of “marriage” is breaking down.  

Reasons include:

1.  Economics:  a woman needn’t be dependent on a man’s income and assets while many men -- maybe the majority -- no longer earn enough money to support a wife, children, and a home.

2.  Ability to control conception of children.

3.  Willingness to abandon or eject children.

4.  Genetic research indicating that monogamous mammals are practically nonexistent: they all get a little on the side if they can.  Birds are more likely pair-bonded, but not always.

5.  Longevity means that human “life-long” can now be a century instead of a few decades.  Relationships tend to be unstable, accumulating children with blurry claims.

6.  Institutionalized nursing, combat, home-maintenance, and urban living make it possible for individuals to survive on their own.

7.  Obvious suffering of women in the old systems.

8.  Belief that people should not be owned by other people.

9.  Reaching the limits of what people can earn.

10.  Punishing poverty with imprisonment and fines.

11.  Big anonymous cities (hide).

12.  Almost unlimited mobility (escape).

Religious institutions have lost their grip on ceremonies of dedication to marriage and children, let alone respect for celibacy.  What was once a serious matter worthy of counseling has slid into being a sort of party about coming of age, esp. for women.  In an effort to keep children born out of wedlock from being shamed, we have succeeded in making everyone shameless, to the point of frothy white wedding dresses designed for the pregnant bride.

Government has had somewhat the same fate.  Over and over guys who wanted to “throw a leg over” have insisted that marriage is just a piece of paper.  Laws that require a father to support his child, and the DNA proof of which child that is, ought to have a sobering effect, as do divorce laws that automatically award a percentage of the couple’s assets according to the length of time they’ve been married.  Very few people sit down to read the state’s laws about ownership and legal obligations in marriage, instead picking up a lot of miscellaneous ideas from television shows where the screenwriters have invented generic locations.  If marrying an enrolled Indian or an immigrant, legal or not, a look into the laws would be very very smart.

Avoid extraterrestrials

Another medical category is disease, fertility, and so on.  Since even microbes have DNA and even viruses have families, it is possible to discover who was contagious, the bug-donor.  Why should the public care?   Because we’re all at risk, because it’s expensive to fight epidemics, because the emergency room at a hospital and the welfare support system both pay out a LOT to people who are in over their heads.  That’s TAX money.

Government’s main job is to keep order and to provide benefits that can’t easily be provided by individuals, mostly infrastructure networks.  Often this extends into medical contexts, even unto death and burial, by dictating who has access to patients in hospitals or make decisions about their treatment.  Taxation, insurance, liability, inheritance and other matters may include weighting in favor of old-fashioned legally married people and their children.

Prince William and Katherine -- but you knew that.

More than any of that technical stuff, the emotional consequences of marriage take people by surprise.  Violence, for instance.  Loving someone more than they love back.  Discovering pasts that come by ambush to claim energy, money, caring.  One’s earliest experience of nuclear family dynamics can erupt into the present, distorting reality and sanity.  Demands from the partner may turn out to be extraordinary: coping with kidnapping or extortion, involvement in gambling, mutilating damage from burns or war, PTSD, surviving community natural disasters or just one’s home’s destruction, addictions of various kinds, chronic diseases.  Loss of a child.  Stigma.  Community hostility.  These days one cannot discount national revolution and riots.

If the love is a true and growing bond, it will ask for many compromises and heartaches, but on the other hand provide someone who is always there, holding out a hand, guarding your back, keeping the bed warm.  That means you have a lot to lose.

When an institution gets hold of a cultural paradigm, it builds it in, tries to make it a law so it won’t go away.  Think of the wedding industry!   If people are on their fourth marriage, unashamed and still prepared to go into debt for all the fancy stuff, it’s great for sales.  All those slick magazines!  All those teenaged girls escaping into fantasy!  All those middle-aged people marrying who can afford so much more!  All those pretty little churches available to rent by people who are sentimental, but not sentimental enough to have established a relationship with their own church.  By the way, wedding cakes and garters are not religious -- they're only merchandise.

But it is the religious institutions who hang on to marriage the hardest.  They muster all the energy they have to summon supernatural forces, though that often raises peculiar problems: if humans are physically reconstituted in heaven -- at what age? Do you get missing parts back?  If persons were married three or fourth times, how does that work out?  Or, changing institutions, don’t any of those insurgents realize how much trouble a hundred virgins would be?  Or maybe they’re not teenagers -- would that be better or worse?  Pruney old maids?  Does the fantasy include boy virgins?

Like contemporary political parties, today's religious institutions are sundered and splintered and contradict each other into paralysis.  The governmental institutions at all levels and in their various departments are just as bad.  No wonder they have no credibility when it comes time for one to curb the other.  It is all too clear that they are simply preserving their own authority and existence rather than trying to find ways to help the people who fund them and suffer from them.

But most humans hope for a special and significant other that matches well enough for the partnership to go on a long time, long enough to grow together and really know each other, share memories, not have to explain everything.  Synergy is the word for two things that are fine separately, but make a jump into much higher value and function when combined.

So what new cultural paradigm is forming?  Gays who marry -- some of whom adopt -- may require a good deal of economic jiggering, maybe require new legal documents stipulating how to handle property and parenthood.  Will some better way of handling abandoned children come out of this?  We can hope.  What will be the final outcome of all the people who so value genomic children of their own that they pay out huge fees and suffer physical pain and risk?  Even now a divorce settlement must include provision for sperm, ova, and conceptia that have been frozen for later activation into children.  Some people care a lot more about them -- since they’re only fantasy -- than about their own rebellious, desperate children.  The law now forbids using those biological resources for anything but becoming children of the donors -- will that change as the authority of religion institutions is weakened more and more?

What should be the minimum obligations of married people to each other?  What will automatically cancel the relationship?  Should there be two stages: one a commitment to intimacy and the other to the creation and raising of children?  (Margaret Mead suggested that many years ago.)   Should there be tests before people are certified for marriage -- not just for STD’s but for financial competency, home maintenance, child-management skills?  How would you enforce such a thing in a culture where people hook up with strangers in bars without so much as catching their names?  Should there be some system of something like kibbutzim for the raising of children in groups?  (How would they be different from old-fashioned miserable orphanages?)  What would the KIDS want?  I think probably a mom and dad, or a mom and mom, or a dad and dad, or at least a mom OR a dad.  Village optional.

MARRIAGE OF "WARRIOR LOVERS"

As marriage becomes a painful fit for some people, new patterns for intimate relationship have developed.  Actually, they are not new since they are as old as homo sapiens (as we know them) -- now just newly given names and assigned characteristics.  The point of loving relationship is intimacy, mutual benefit, dependability, and pleasure.

Some of these ideas come from the formal field called the “evolution of sexuality”, which begins with women assigned to be the gatherers and child bearers and men assigned to be the warriors and hunters.  But these roles when matched with the preferences and talents of actual human beings reveal over-lapping bell curves: some men would rather gather and some women would rather hunt.  Not all.  But we seem to be past the idea that all human beings are equal and alike.  (Whew!)  There are real differences, some due to gender, and real outliers, some from heredity and some from culture.

Newer evidence comes from the examination of porn (depictions of the direct act of sex) which seems to be the preference of most men, versus romance novels (accounts of the story of intimacy) which appears to be what women want.  (Equally unreal.)  These preferences are linked to the act of procreation (men) and the creation of family (women).  In terms of biology, men risk violence for a few moments of intense feeling and women risk pregnancy for at least twenty years of relationship with children.  Until a hundred years ago, giving birth often killed women.  Still today competing men confront each other violently.

Evidence comparing straight men versus gay men via the porn industry -- both the viewers and the providers -- suggests that the ONLY difference between straight and gay is in their desire preference -- whether for the same or for the different sex -- which is evidently set during gestation.   Nothing to do with frailty or boldness or muscles.   True of many mammals. Outside of that (bell curve again) gay men seem on the whole to have better sex and have bigger crucial equipment.  Each set of men -- gay or straight -- distribute out over every spectrum in roughly the same ways: big tough guy vs. wimp, scholar vs. pugilist, caring and protective father vs. seed scatterers. 

Women distribute along their own curve with the difference that they can adapt to many kinds of men or even a woman partner as the wage-earner, the aggressor, the tough one.  Children, so long as their basic needs are met, are quite comfortable with whichever sex is doing the parenting and can even -- up to a point, which is mostly the acquisition of speech -- be protected by other species.  (A wolf cannot teach a child to talk.)  The ideal, because it is the most evolved and so far the most successful pattern, is a nurturing mother and a protective father who love each other and therefore keep the family boat on an even keel.  

One of the most startling phenomena, now much better known than when it formed in the Seventies, is a particular genre of romantic fiction, in which attachment and bonding between media characters, both of them men, extends to include female ideas.  That is, men-identified-as-men who are intimate in a female way,  not just physical but also emotional and spiritual. This is called  K/S or “slash” fiction.  It stands for Kirk-slash-Spock, because it began with this heart-versus-head pair on “Star Trek.”  By now many fictional pairs of male friends -- intense and loyal male partners being a trope of fiction going back to “Gilgamesh” -- have been further explored as lovers by fans online.  When readers and writers of slash fiction (not always explicit about the sex act, as much as the emotional commitment) are interviewed and categorized, they tend to be women who are inside the statistical bell curve of male social roles.  Not their physical appearance, but their interests and abilities.  Uppity women.  Border jumpers.  Tom boys.

In the real world, K/S fans might or might not be lesbian and might be in straight childless marriages dedicated to a common cause.  Might not be married at all.  These women might be described as adventurers or even warriors.  As Salmon and Symons put it in their amazing small book, they prefer to be warrior partners rather than wives of warriors.  A marriage on this basis can work very well so far as society is concerned, but is not easy for every real-life couple.  

The version of this kind of woman that I like best is the Chinese movie “samurai” from the Western steppes: skillful, disciplined, dedicated, athletic.  (Maybe because they are the ones I least resemble.)  I also love their male warrior lovers, who are often near-shamans because the intimacy involved is far more than physical.  Other women warriors are more likely to be rivals than partners.  Best not to try to control or punish such women.  They might make good partners for younger men.  Think of the relationship of “M” to James Bond, especially in “Skyfall.”  This is all fantasy.  What’s wrong with that?  So long as one remembers it's not reality.

Early (naive?) same sex marriages were seen as asymmetrical: one more powerful than the other, one more “femme” than the other, one more “mommie” than the other.  In my experience there are as many kinds of intimate partnership as there are kinds of people.  Literary teddybears have as much in common as big stud grizzlies, though I don’t suppose the two groups socialize together much.  

In a rural small town there is a lot of homosociality, that is, gender-assigned socializing.  The guys do the big machinery stuff and the gals do the quilting.  By junior high the sports tend to
sort the kids -- football for boys, volleyball for girls, with golf or track as unisex.  The consensus that develops in these separated groups can be pretty out-of-sync in many ways.  A place like this is likely to be less tolerant of outliers, especially if they cross over to the other homosociality group, which can lead to suspicion about sexuality.  If a boy’s idea of a machine is a Singer or a stove and a girl’s idea of fun is repairing combines or shooting gophers, they can be made to feel pretty uncomfortable.  But that has nothing to do with their sexual desires or with their ability to form intimate relationships over a long period of time.  Sometimes art or music offers a common ground.

The qualities that make a sexual union good for parenting kids are not the ones that distinguish gay from straight or tough from gentle.  What’s needed is adults who pay attention, who have resources (not just money), and who are stable enough so the kid can use his or her energy to grow and acquire skills instead of always having to accommodate adult caprices and traumas.  In an era where people tend to be a lot more fluid in many ways (maybe they wander or maybe males get killed young) the old tribal pattern of mom and uncle seems to work, which takes the sexuality of the adults out of consideration, but not the cultural pride of having a father and his genetic bequest.

What qualities enable the survival of children family by family, and which ones support the survival of children as a society?  The two are braided together, but it seems obvious that feeding programs, health programs, and education are vital.  Housing is now becoming crucial.  Tolerance of differences, basic information about self-management, role-models of many kinds, and now I would add self-protective out-reach to the Internet larger world, means of self-expression, and a refusal to victimize or be victimized -- the list could get pretty long.  Maybe patterns of three adult “parents” will rise to meet the challenge.  Or could we revive the idea of “god-parents”?  Or the Blackfeet custom of all one's mother’s sisters being one’s mother and all one’s father’s brothers being one’s father?  Warrior lovers.  Why get stuck in stereotypes?

Michelle Yeoh