I was watching a movie about Nora Ephram earlier and I knew the name but I couldn't place her. Only during the movie did I realize that her voice has been a large part of my reading material and movies I watched growing up.
It is funny how someone can touch you in a way that they will never know, even after their death at times. This lady was an incredible writer. She is the writer that I would like to be. And she did exactly what I have thought, and exactly what I had always been told about the best writing, which is that you should write what you know.
I have always done my best writing when I was writing about something that I know. If it is about my life then I can write about it forever it seems. I can find words for weeks.
She also seemed to be the kind of person that others went to for certain advice and who would be very certain in her opinions. She seemed to come across as a very interesting person. She seems to be an understanding and observant. She seems very honest and she seems very generous which does have a way of drawing people in.
Did I become who I am in part because of anything that I may have read, or a movie that I may have seen, the she wrote? How much OD that influenced who I am and how I see the world?
Did the opinions of strong women from the 70s, 80s, and 90s shape me into the stronger woman that I am?
I watched a documentary on Gloria Steinham not long ago and she made the comment that they didn't want the women who came after them to be grateful for the rights they now have. They wanted them to feel like there was more to be done. They didn't want them to accept a little bit because then they'd accept the way that things would end up going backwards.
And they were exactly right.
Feminism took good hold with people in my generation but the two generations after me have not gotten the message. They had an anti-feminist movement on Twitter where young girls would say things that were so anti women, that it is going to set us back. It will set all women back.
I heard that the boys of today are actually the group that is least likely to want to work for a woman or be comfortable with a woman in a position of power. I didn't quite understand why that would be.
Are the boys today upset that their mothers aren't home from work with them everyday? Are they suffering from the women's movement? Or are they somehow threatened by women becoming their equals in every sense of the word? Or are they having a problem with women because of their deadbeat dad's? Or are they having a problem with women because of their fathers negative views on women? Do their fathers have those negative views on women because of the women in their lives having been influenced by the women's movement of the 70s?
If any of that, or all of it, is true does that mean that the women's movement was a bad thing? Absolutely not.
I remember my mom's mother, my granny, always telling me that I did not need to depend on a man. That I did not need to become dependant on a man. She said to me that if I was waiting for a man to open a door for me, I'd be waiting forever. She said if I wanted a door open, I would have to open it myself.
For a long time, I sort of felt that in a strong way to the point where it was odd to me if a guy insisted upon opening my doors for me. I was more of the type who if I was walking up to a restaurant and I reached the door first, I'd open it and hold it for you. If you got there first, then you could hold it for me.
But I never have been one who cared much about wanting to be the first one who opened the door. Probably because I like to look around when I walk in and I like to more or less have someone else to hide behind.
I know the reasons for that go deep into my psyche. It comes from growing up in a house full of anger. For whatever reason, my childhood years weren't the happiest of my life because my mom spent so many years miserable.
Somehow I saw that I could not, would not, live in misery. I could not be the cause of why anyone was miserable. And for a long time in my life I thought that my being born was the reason she had made decisions that ended up in her being miserable. So there was a lot of guilt there too.
Yet somehow through my grandmother's words I felt like I had something to prove. I needed to be ambitious and I needed to be great. As a small child I wanted to be a teacher. As an older child, I wanted to be a judge.
When did all of that change? When did I decide that I was supposed to be somehow in politics or law? When I visited Washington DC after the 6th grade, I remember having the best time. I saw the things I had only read about. I saw the places of history.
I saw the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the Mall. It was astounding.
I guess I fell in love with Washington DC and I knew I wanted to go to college at Georgetown. I wanted to accomplish all of these things, and of course, I have not done those things. As you probably well know, life happens while we are making other plans.
At some point, life changed my ambitious nature went more of into a practicality. I went into Business Management, because my aunt had majored in that and I knew if she could do it then I could do it too. It wouldn't be that bad. My choices at that time were limited, or so I thought. In actuality my choices were so vast at that time, but they were unknown to me in a way that only hindsight can show you once that time in your life has passed.
A friend of mine used to tell me that I had the world by the tail. I didn't know what that meant until I no longer had the world by the tail.
Yet through it all, I had an idea of finding an idealized type of love and marriage that I don't think that anyone could ever measure up to that. I wanted to have children and be a mother, but the best mother... With the house everyone wanted to hang out in and that had fresh baked cookies everyday. But did I want to be a housewife with kids because my mom couldn't be? Did I want a mom who was there for me because she wasn't because she was working? I don't know that.
Because I have gone back and forth over wanting to do something important in my life and with helping people and becoming one who makes history and in being the best mother one could be, I have not accomplished either of those things.
At 36, I have no children, no marriage and also no divorce, a college education, but no real career or sense of self. I wonder if I am actually living the life that I want to live but at least I am not making someone else miserable along the way?
An uncle of mine told me not too long ago that I was waiting for the perfect man and that man was not coming. Maybe I am.
But I don't think so. I am waiting on the perfect one for me before I could make a commitment of marriage. I didn't want to end up divorced and in the middle of my life (hopefully the early middle), I have not been divorced. So I can say that I have succeeded at that.
I have had alot of love, more than my fair share of lovers, and many, many bed partners. But I have had no children and I still live on the same property that I grew up living on.
And I have no idea what I am doing with my life. Yet somehow I feel like maybe I am finding myself in all of this mess.
At least I hope I find myself. Because I am pretty damn tired of looking for her.
