The Eighth and Ninth Wonders of the World

As a child, I thought of my father as the Eighth and Ninth Wonders of the World.

At his best, my father was the Colossus at Rhodes, larger than life. He was a big Irishman: handsome, flirty, charismatic, quick witted, clever and totally irresistible to everyone who ever met or knew him. To the world, he was a man’s man, a women’s dream, and the father all my friends wanted to have. I loved him more than anyone.

My father was also Mt. Vesuvius, a verbally eruptive force of nature. He was the most terrifying and hurtful person I knew. He could have you laughing uproariously one minute and, with a flip of his tongue, put a dagger through your heart the next. The scary part was that it was completely unpredictable which Wonder he would be and for how long. It was like living in the shadow of an active volcano, knowing that it was going to blow but never knowing when. And when it did, the lava it spewed was hot, swift, and inescapable. I hated him. And I loved him more than anyone.

I realize now that my father was as unfulfilled as my mother. He was a man caught in the times, a young man who loved the arts, reading, and the world. A gifted athlete from a very poor family with a football scholarship to University that was derailed when WWII broke out. He married my mother during the war and came home to the beautiful but isolated New England island of his youth to climb telephone poles for a living.

Neither of my parents had the privilege of thinking about their inner lives. They were busy trying to put food on the table like most of their friends. And while my mother was living the life she did not want in silent desperation, my father was living the life he did not want by railing against the world. The funny thing is, after my father retired, he quite happily became the voracious reader, the innovative chef, and the creative home tender that my mother never wanted to be.

I had a mother who wanted to live her life as a "man", and a father who wanted to live as a "woman," but they let their lives be firmly imprisoned by their time and their gender. And although I chose not to grow up feminine, I did grow up female in my family. I think that was a blessing.

For My Mommy and Me

I have a picture of me when I was about 5 or 6. It’s Christmas day, and I am wearing a beautiful tulle dress with a red ribbon around my waist. (Or so my mother told me at least 500 times.) It is almost impossible to see the dress in the picture because over this beautiful new Christmas dress is an entire cowgirl outfit (gun holster, guns and all), on my head a cowgirl hat, and on my feet are my new cowgirl boots. My new Christmas shiny patent leather Mary Jane shoes are upside down and discarded in front of me. Apparently, I refused to wear my new Christmas dress unless I was allowed to wear my cowgirl outfit over it. (Or so my mother told me at least 500 times.)

My mother wanted a doll-child to dress up. It was the last thing I wanted. How was I supposed to run and play with my brothers and my cousins if I had to worry about falling over and exposing my underwear? And sit with my ankles crossed??? I was too fat for that. My ankles never cooperated, and always at the moment I least expected it, my little leg muscles would get so tired from holding my thighs together that my ankles would explode away from each other as if they had let out the biggest ankle sneeze in the world. Now THAT was embarrassing.

I was a little fat girl. Dresses made me feel ridiculous. I loved to dance, but standing around in ballet class in a tutu with all those little tiny girls…well, let’s just say…I was the elephant in the room.

But I think my size was more about my rejection of the feminine than my desire to eat. My mother was very feminine and pretty, tough to compete with when you feel like a gargoyle. But more than that, I saw my mother as the doll she wanted me to be… a very fragile porcelain doll. I was afraid she could break at any minute.

My mother cried a lot at home. She was quite gay and lively around others, but at home…not so much. She was an outline of a person. I never really knew what colors she had inside. Everything was deferred to my father, everything was done for my father, everything was blamed on my father. (Don’t feel too sorry for him. He was a handful.)

Although I did not understand it at the time, my mother was the product of her mother, and her mother’s mother before her and so on. My mother got a lot of juice around her femininity because of her looks and her social personality, but now I realize she was stuck in it. Her strong identification with the definition of what it was to be feminine at that time made her very unhappy, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled. She enjoyed the three of us, my brothers and I, but motherhood was not really what she wanted. She wanted to go out and be “someone.” She wanted what being male offered but she was so entrenched in societal expectation that I don’t think she knew how to get out or, worse, who she would be if she did.

So maybe I became a man for my mommy and me.

My Life As A Man

I am a child of the 50’s. So, like a lot of girls of that era, I grew up to be a man.

Back then, genders were defined by the roles they were allowed to have. It was all so clear. Boys and men did or didn’t do certain things, and girls and women did or didn’t do others.

I grew up in a family full of boys. I was the only girl, so naturally I wanted to do what they were doing otherwise I was left out and alone. However, I also consciously remember rejecting what it meant to be a girl. One time when I was about 15, I was playing football with the boys. One of the older boys (maybe he was all of 17 ½) said to me, “You have penis envy!” To which I responded, “Yes, I have always had the desire to be red, wrinkled, and four inches tall.” Now mind you, I said this having not yet had the pleasure of meeting a penis [in the flesh so to speak]. Everyone hooted and howled, and I thought I was quite clever, but I knew in my heart his observation about me was pretty darn close.

Truth was that I didn’t want a penis. I wanted what the penis gave me in life: power, control, access to earning lots of my own money, an open door to any kind of education and career that I wanted… a real and self-navigated life. I started to study men.

I did not know how to be a woman and still be powerful and self-determining. The female models in my youth were submissive, manipulative, unfulfilled, second class citizens, arm candy; their worth determined by the status of the man who claimed her as his own. I knew that would make me miserable, so I watched very carefully, and I started to act like a man.

I got quite good at it. I entered college when the only majors open to women were teaching and nursing (and being a nun…that one was never on my plate). I have 4 Master’s degrees and have created and held well-paid positions full of creativity and power. I have been married (ok…twice) and I have a son that I adore.

But I have also been miserable being so ingrained in the intellect, the ways of men, and so disconnected from my feminine power: the power of my intuition, my emotional guidance system, the access I have to wisdom within myself.

It’s not that the masculine is bad, it is just that now that is not enough either. For me, I have realized this issue of balancing my masculine and feminine powers is at the heart of my intention to reconcile the irreconcilable separateness within.

So now what?

My Christmas Gift

I have been thinking a lot the past several days about expansion and contraction and how necessary one is for the other.

The day before Christmas, my pre-emptive fears were the contraction into an old way of being. But instead of ignoring these feelings as silly or selfish or too hard to deal with as I had in the past, I took note of them, named them, and welcomed them in. In accepting them without judgment, I was, simply, able to expand into something more truthful and empowering and let them go.

Yes, I taught the men in my life how to treat me. But instead of staying in victimization about the situation, I realized that I can also teach them to treat me differently. Will it be easy for me or for them? No. Will it cause more “problems?” Probably. Will their behaviors towards me change? Hopefully. Will I start to be the woman I was born to be? Most definitely.

I awoke on Chrstmas day feeling wonderful. There were no “gifts” for me. Yes, my son gave me a card. Yes, his father gave me a card, too. You know what?? In both cases, they wrote how much I mean to them, how precious they think I am, and how grateful they are to have me in their lives.

It was a damn good day.

“Relationships are not there to make us happy. They are there to make us conscious.” Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Just So You Know

I would like to make this perfectly clear from the beginning. I am not a crier. Never have been.

So why is it that I have spent the last year alone, in my living room, literally on my knees, gushing projectile tears more times than I can count?