A Week Inside My Head

Aside from keeping the home-fires burning here in Cambridge, and learning to fly gliders, I've been finding time to focus on the novel that has been an on-again, off-again project for a few years. It began with a never talked about bit of Rueger family history: that my father's first wife was killed when she stepped in front of a train.

That of course led to tracking down all manner of family history, which inevitably led to asking all manner of difficult questions.

Questions like whether my Mom was already on the scene before Dad's first wife was killed. Which inevitably leads to asking whether my mother was the kind of woman - in the 1940s - who would go to bed with a married man.* And who would then marry him, and stay with him until his death many decades later.

After that, she seems to have burned or disposed of virtually everything that might have reminded her of him, or told her children things about him.

All of this is the basis for what has become a fascinating work of fiction. Because pretty much no-one really knows how either of my parents really thought about all of this (my cousin Crystal being the noteworthy exception, who explains that her secret is that she was willing to just sit and listen to what older family members had to say.) I'm creating a world, a chronology, and dynamics pretty much from scratch.

What I'm finding that will likely never show up in the book, is more concerning: I'm realizing - and why this would surprise me is as much a mystery as anything else - is that my behaviours, and my relationships with women (at least in the past) were in all likelihood influenced greatly by what I saw in my father. I can see actions on my part that now are embarrassing, or even things that make me ashamed.

I think that I've transcended most of those attitudes, but I still dwell on how they influenced me in the past.

At the same time, when I look back on my past, both professionally, and in other parts of my life, I can say without hesitation that every step forward, every good thing that I've done, and every success that I've enjoyed, owes much to the women around me. And I'm willing to state that almost without exception, the role models that I have learned from, and followed, have almost all been women.

Perhaps it's because I was raised almost exclusively by my Mom - Dad really wasn't part of the equation - I understand women more than men, and find a lot of what the men around me represented - and still represent - confusing or even offensive. A good example of that happened last week at the gliding centre where I'm flying, where one of the old guys (likely younger than me, but you know what I mean) told this joke:

Guy goes into a bank. Three bank robbers with masks come in to rob it. One of them has their mask slip down, exposing their face.
He turns to the customers kneeling on the floor, looks at one and says: Did you see my face?
Customer #1 says "Yes", and BLAM, the robber shoots him.
Customer #2 also says "Yes", and BLAM, the robber shoots him as well.
Customer #3 says "No, I didn't see your face. But my wife did!"

It's 2026. I would have found this offensive in 1976. I'm left asking how anyone could still be telling jokes like this fifty years later. Did this idiot miss the entire womens' movement? Feminism?

Then I look at what's happening south of Canada, in the US, and the whole "trad-wife" thing, and the battle to remove women's control of their own bodies, and complaints that teen girls aren't having enough babies, and I find myself thinking "Oh wow, they're trying to drag us back to the 1940s again."

I'm old enough to remember when women still needed their husband's signatures for things that now feel like every day transactions. When they couldn't get a bank loan on their own, or a credit card. None of these things are carved in stone. They can be stripped away far too easily.

I also remember the exact wording of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, a thing that was never passed:

"ARTICLE —

"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

That was the entire amendment, yet the American people refused to add it to the document that is at the root of every law that they have.

For someone of my age, examining the world that my mother was raised in, and lived in, by definition causes me to also look at my own life, and the conditions and assumptions that surround my upbringing - and behaviour. I guess the next question is how much of what I've done in the past can be laid at the feet of my father, and the age that I was raised in, and how much is mine, and mine alone.

*I'd like to be clear that when I came to this realization, also realized that I had no problem with it. Good for Mom!