MIDDLE GROUND

 I have been writing a new book, one about the journey back to life after being nearly fatally poisoned a couple years ago.  The lessons learned in the dark have been deep and broad and, I think, applicable to being human in these times on this planet.

 As I write and reflect, the concept of patriarchy keeps popping up.

Everywhere.

Internally and all around me.

So, let’s chat about that, shall we? I was born at a time in the US when women didn’t have many rights.  A woman, until I was a teenager, couldn’t do much financially without the permission of her husband or father – no to a credit card, no to a car loan, and the idea of approaching a bank for help buying a house in your own name was completely out of the question. There were few role models for strong, independent women and my future, like all girls, was limited by common beliefs that, for example, a girl couldn’t be a doctor – only a nurse. 

Disney released many of their classic princess themed animated movies at that time, too, further emphasizing the need to wait for your handsome prince. The message - that marriage was where happiness was found –and that raising someone’s children was the pinnacle of fulfillment though there was an awful lot of cooking, cleaning and doing his laundry along the way.  They never showed that aspect of life, did they? You only saw the full makeup, hair carefully coiffed, elegantly dressed wife waiting at the door with a cocktall.

No wonder men want the 1950s back!

Media eventually introduced other options, less rigid roles and truer to life ones, and the world responded in time with many freedoms for women in America and around the world. For decades, women expanded their roles in the business world while carrying the same or similar duties at home. We now call it the “invisible load” but this, too, was depicted in the media along the way, creating the expectation that we could do it all. Television commercials routinely showed that perfectly put together woman in hose, heels and huge shoulder pads  “bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan and never ever letting him forget he’s the man”.

A couple generations of women were raised with the understanding that they could have it all, and more so, were expected to do it all while smiling big. I was one of those women, I believed that being married was the ultimate goal, that having children was implicit and furthermore, that the needs of said husband and children came first, every day. All day. 

And I, like many women, became sick and tired.  Literally. 

It turns out we can have it all, just not all at the same time. 

Around the turn of the century, the cracks began to show. Everywhere. As civil rights also expanded, our ideas of “normal” life were shattered and gradually shifted – for some of us very begrudgingly. Individuals and groups, large and small, were coming out of the shadows they’d lived in for so long and in so many ways, this shifted our world. For many of us, this was an incredibly wonderful and inspiring thing. 

Unfortunately, for others, it seems to have brought on deep fear.  Observing the recent events in the US from here in South Africa has been surreal, I’ll admit, and anywhere between heartbreaking and horrifying, depending on the day. All around the world, the descendants of colonists (people who look like me) seem to have a strong need to hold onto all they have – their land, their control mechanisms, their power and privilege. 

And all of that has led me to thinking about the purpose behind the patriarchy.  Volumes have been written on this by far more qualified people but as best I can tell, the common understanding is that the patriarchy is about power.  Men have had power for a very long time now and it makes sense that they don’t want to give it up, for sure. But what’s underneath that?  A little digging brought up something that rings very true for me – the concept that what men really want is immortality.

Ah.  This makes sense, doesn’t it?  And here’s the kicker.  Women, at least the ones I know of, don’t seem at all concerned about immortalizing themselves.  The big monuments, huge companies, volumes of their philosophies gathered in impressive libraries made of stone.  That sounds true.

And women?  We create life.

Rather than set our ourselves in stone or into law, we naturally lead with our hearts, our souls.  We create homes, organizations and work which brings others to life in one way or another.  And often, we bring new life to the world in the literal sense, too. That’s what we do naturally. 

Given all those decades of growth in women’s rights, though, I think we have lost our way.

Coming of age in the late seventies and early eighties, I was in those trenches.  To gain equal opportunities, we leaned hard into our masculine sides.  We learned how to maneuver the hallowed halls of academia and business like a guy, something which always required supplanting our own instincts – and natural abilities – with the huge desire to play with the big boys. 

And look where it got us.

The world as we know it is collapsing before our eyes.  Structures (like, say, the Constitution in the US) we thought were bedrock are being stripped away in a matter of days. Fear, always an instrument of those in power, is being distributed like candy on Halloween. And there seem to be some poison apples in the bowls, too. 

Just as the deliberate poisoning I was subjected to was meant to silence me, this explosion of change is meant to silence anything that isn’t the patriarchy – the very pale movement which is so afraid of losing the power it has had for so long that it would sooner destroy the world rather than allow it to change to a more balanced, liberated, enlightened place for everyone to thrive. It seems quite counterproductive, of course, to immortalizing things but that’s the way it is going, fast. 

And some days it seems like just too much, doesn’t it?  Too much too fast and anything we might do seems far too little in the face of it all. 

I have an idea. We find our balance again, just as I had to in order to heal from that near death experience. We find the middle ground.  I know it sounds simplistic yet I know I’m not alone in believing that we do know how to right this ship. And here’s how we might go about it:

We lean the other way, Just as you would to swing the sail on a boat, we shift into our feminine side, as a species.  Men, those who see what’s happening, that means you too.  We take all that we’ve been told is right, acceptable and the way to get things done and we throw it all away.

We reject it.

We cannot see the patriarchy as something that is put on us, or a monster lurking over everything.  It is something we have all created.  In living from our masculine, we as women have bought into it, into the whole “one day your prince will come” thing.  We have allowed ourselves to be weak in order to be wanted. Men, being human, let a lot slide because in the end, it’s a comfortable place for them to live. They have become complacent, and honestly, who can blame them? It works for them, at least the paler ones. 

And now it is broken.  And it is destroying our world, one tiny explosion at a time. 

So in order to move forward, we need each other.  The human species was designed as the ying/yang symbol is.  Equal and opposite.  The strong holding up the week, the shadow allowing the light to shine. 

To find balance, we must return to our original form, one which includes this shadow and light in so many ways.  We each have our innate power and seek support for our less developed side. In order to balance all of us, each of us needs to take the time and space to be true to ourselves.

I wonder what that could look like.  Wouldn’t that change things – for us all, to find a middle ground?

And don’t we all deserve a chance to try?

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