June 29, 2007

• After the Wedding (public preamble)

  Before I get on with the story, I want to respond to a comment left by ItzaRoos on the (protected) Womanhood post.

  Seems so many girls in the 50′s got married young. Do you think times
  have changed, or is it more regional? I lived in the midwest until
  almost ten, now in California.

  I also find it refreshing that
  you don’t apologize, even indirectly, for who you were and what you did
  then. So many of us find it painful to revisit our past indiscretions
  without cringing or painting some form of denial into the picture.

  In mainstream American culture, marriage is no longer viewed as quite so necessary as it used to be.  Even though birth control pills were not available then but are now, and abortion was illegal then, teen pregnancy rates are still high, but I frankly don’t know how they compare to what they were then (and don’t suppose anyone really knows accurately, since such shameful secrets were often well hidden).  It is more socially acceptable now, and therefore more feasible and comfortable for a girl to have a baby and give it away or raise it as a single mother.

  There were regional differences even then in the prevalence of early marriage, but I think socioeconomic factors had more to do with that than did geography.  In the rural South, and in poverty pockets wherever, girls were not expected to finish school and there was pressure for them to marry and relieve their fathers of the burden of their support.  Relatively few women had careers, or even jobs.  Often, they married older men.  What I did, marrying a sixteen-year-old when I was fourteen, was unusual even then, even in the Texas Panhandle.

  About that other matter, my unapologetic openness, I suppose it comes mostly from the self-acceptance I have learned through psychotherapy and the path of spiritual development I have been following for more than half my lifetime now.  I consciously work to transcend fear and denial.  Accepting myself as I am now is pretty easy, because for a long time I have been living by this one rule:  “Do nothing to damage your self-esteem.”  Accepting myself as I used to be isn’t always so easy, but I make the effort. 

  There was a long hiatus in my memoir writing before I got to where I could start telling this part of my story.  I had to deal with feelings I had repressed for decades, and had to work to recover memories of events that I had worked to forget.  As I said in a recent post, if I told this story from my current perspective, it would be short and not very interesting:  “I was nuts, and I did stupid things.”  To tell a story that would be worth reading, I had to get back into the mind of that ignorant, foolish, fearful, emotionally needy young woman and let her tell the story.  In the process, I discovered that I actually like her… wouldn’t want to be her, but she has her points.

  The protected Womanhood episode mentioned above preceded the public wedding episode that precedes the protected post that is coming up next.  I’ll remind everyone that these posts are protected not because I want to hide anything.  Xanga has to conform to standards of public decency, and some people believe that some subjects are not fit for the eyes of children.  I don’t share that belief, never censored what my son Doug said, or what he read or viewed, and am pleased with the attitudes and mentality he developed as a result.  I simply feel I have too much invested in this site to allow it to be shut down before I’m done with it.  It is a compromise–a lousy, stinking, unjust, expletive deleted culturally and religiously biased violation of my (and your) First Amendment rights, but I’ll live with it unless I find a workable alternative.

  

  • 8:31 pm
  • 6 Comments