A Feminist When It Suited Her

This generally was originally published as two posts in January and March 2018 on my old blog… I have merged the two posts and updated it and edited some parts out/added some new parts etc.

In 2018, I came across this image while scrolling on facebook, that international women’s day, attached to a Swedish news article (aftonbladet.com – Vilhelm Stokstad) and at first I thought OMG I want that necklace. Because, hey, I’m a sucker for pretty, classic silver necklaces. But then I had a memory. A memory of obtaining a pin with that same symbol, colored with purple enamel, when I was a teen. I don’t recall where exactly I got it from – someone handing them out somewhere, Hötorget…? Maybe even school.

I put it on my small grey Jansport backpack that Fredrik had given me, along with my patch that said “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”

Then my mother noticed it and asked with absolute disgust why I had that pin.

I don’t recall what I responded, probably something about liking the idea of it, and I can still see her rolling her eyes at me. She responded something to the effect I shouldn’t support such things, I didn’t even know what it meant etc etc. I still kept it on my backpack for a good long time, though.

I’ve never wanted to be a full-on activist. I’ve never wanted to be militant for my beliefs – I just want people to get along and respect each other’s viewpoints and causes. I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with the concept of feminism.

Yet, it seems so wrong that a mother in particular would try to shut down her daughter’s even remote interest in the equality, strength, and power of women. You’d think a mother would want to teach her daughters to be strong, self-sufficient, and interested in bettering their own lot in life – let alone those of other females in general.

The strange thing about my mom is that at one point, she did become almost a militant version (read man-hating) of a feminist. Seems she became a feminist when it suited her around the time she divorced my dad just a few years later – around the time I was getting married. I wasn’t taught the same way she taught my sisters growing up. They were 15, 13, and 9 when I moved out. For example, she drilled into my sister, who had been 13 when I left, that she didn’t need no man to support her, etc.

Only to change tack and become critical of her not getting married yet at one point – after my mom had remarried herself. After she remarried, she decided she wasn’t so feminist after all, I guess. My sister was still in university at the time, getting her Masters or PhD, and she did, in fact, get married within a few years of that… but not until she was good and ready and not just settling for a man “to take care of her,” as my mom had said she needed. Of course, she just about shot milk through her nose at that – figuratively, I don’t know for a fact she was drinking milk at the time, LOL.

For her, she had no recollection of my mom ever talking that way to her before.

Me, on the other hand, I don’t have particular memories of her encouraging me to be independent of a male partner. In fact, just a year or two out of high school (after I was already married anyway), she was even mad that I didn’t marry Maarten when I “had the chance,” as she put it. She didn’t even know Maarten had even been a possibility before then… She just happened to find out about Maarten and I having a little thing and discussing it when I was a senior, and he had gone off to Uni… (We made a marriage pact, we would have been married by the time I was 22ish if we kept the pact – instead I got married at 20 to my husband – and I like to think I absolutely devastated Maarten (but I know it’s not true and he got married like a year later anyway) but I digress… )

Sigh. Anyway, thinking about my mom makes me tired.

I wonder sometimes if my personality would have been much changed if I had grown up in a slightly different atmosphere. Who am I kidding, of course I would be. I have thought often before about if I hadn’t grown up going to evangelical churches that taught me out right that I shouldn’t dress certain ways that it would tempt men (and that I would be responsible for those thoughts they’d have), or that the only reason to divorce (and therefore leave a relationship in general in my mind as a young teen) was if they cheated on you… So, if you know me at all at this point, that was one of the direct contributing factors in me not leaving abusive relationships as soon as I should have.

But in January of 2018, hubs said something that made me think… I had been blaming Wyatt for instilling a lot of negative relationship behaviors in me… and to an extent I think that’s still true, but perhaps I’ve been bred to be … How did he put it? … I can’t remember exactly… basically, though, I was brought up in what was an abnormal childhood that affected my propensity for falling in with abusive men.

No, it was not the moving around from place to place etc… Those were privileges I had that most people didn’t, but that’s not what made it abnormal per se.

My sister had come to visit that January and my husband learned a lot more about my childhood than he had bargained for. He started learning about it all around a year prior when we spent time actually staying with my mom around Christmas …Even I was startled at the atmosphere after having been out of it for 13 years. While my sister was with us, he learned about a lot more of our backstories. Stuff I had mentioned here and there before, but he hadn’t grasped the full picture; the details had escaped him. He made comment that several of these childhood memories weren’t “normal,” we laughed and told him it was our normal, our truth.

I grew up in a narcissistic environment, a passive-aggressive narcissistic environment. …and the view from the outside, as it’s been pointed out to me, is that I was brought up to cater to narcissism. I grew up learning to keep the peace and to make others happy.

Hubs said something about David and Wyatt both clearly having similar personalities. Both abusers, both narcissists.  …And when I started dating Wyatt, I found nothing abnormal within my relationship. That’s what made it so easy to suppress the unpleasantness and essentially lie to myself about what that relationship had been all about for 16 years.

While there are certain male-specific-triggered behaviors and even abusive situation behavior (such as how I acted with David – returning to my 14 year old mindset… apologizing, though I had done nothing wrong…) that I most definitely took on subconsciously while dating Wyatt. There is a whole lot more to the clusterfuck that is my personality, based on how I was raised.

I recall, for one, that my mom used to always tell me to smile and I’m so much prettier when I smile etc – something I’ve heard many women complain about as a typically male attitude and statement. While I have had a few men say such to me, I have heard it by far more often from my mom. She put a lot of emphasis on my looks in particular as well – as opposed to my sisters, I mean. It all just makes me think, whether consciously or not, she was training me to be amenable to men.

To my mom’s credit she did tell me I could be whatever I wanted to be in general, but I was not treated as the academic in the family (maybe thats why I’m all about my education and pushing through my graduate studies as an adult…) There still seemed to be the understanding that I’d cleave myself to a man someday. Clearly, from what she said to my sister, she believed we’d need men to take care of us regardless of what we ended up doing with our lives.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be taken care of. Some women want to be homemakers and take care of kids while their husband works. Some of them want to defer big decisions to him and let him take the burden of major aspects of their shared life. That’s okay. I’m not ragging on that… It’s just important in my mind to grow up knowing you have the option. To have the confidence in yourself that your gender will not hold you down or that you need to hide part of yourself away for the sake of your partner.

I’m ashamed to say now that when I was, oh, 16, I told a guy I could be whatever he wanted me to be if we dated. I had the ability to be more feminine, like he liked.

Fuck, ok. That guy was Maarten… Early on in knowing him… The stuff above didn’t occur until nearly 3 years later. Anyway, I was already aware that I acted certain parts in different relationships before I said that to him. The fact that I was so pliable to the whims of guys bothers me now.