Courage doesn’t always roar, sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day whispering ‘I will try again tomorrow’.” Mary Anne Radmacher
Throughout our lives, we struggle and we experience joy and sorrow, laughter, tears, reasons to change, constantly, from moment to moment and always, it takes a courageous heart. At University, I read a play called “A Doll’s House”, by
No, I could not relate. Bit by bit, she realizes that she had been nothing but a doll in her father’s life and in her husband’s life, nothing more than a “silly girl”, whenever she spoke her mind. She decides to leave them all. She was the ‘doll’ in the dollhouse, totally dependent on her husband and her father’s world. She was unappreciated and she was ‘playing’ the doll. She was everything the males in her family and in her society, of the times, expected her to be. She began by indulging in sweets and lying about it. For her, this was her little rebellion and was a thing unheard of in her world. As well, she cusses and then, ultimately, she leaves her husband and children in an act that, in her time, took incredible courage. I almost despised her because, I, too, had been living in a dollhouse of sorts, accepting what I was expected to take (“You made your bed, now lie in it” ideology of my own father when hearing that his daughter was newly married to an abuser.) I was brought up by a man living on the cusp of social norms that belonged, in part, to the Victorian age, for no fault of his own. I was six generations after him and an anomaly to him. I was raised by a mother who had sacrificed her own happiness and life for her family and who gave up being married and having children because she was expected to work and financially care for her family through the dirty thirties. She married an older man when both late in life. I was an anomaly to her as well. And when I left my marriage, my mother could not even begin to imagine why I did not just take it and learn to accept life as it was.
How many of us, now late into our senior years, lived at a time when we were to be seen and not heard? How many of us heard that we were “owned’ by our husbands because it cost him $5.00 for the marriage incense? (God’s truth). We were still, in our late teens, owned by the men in our lies and would always be some man’s daughter, or some Mr.’s Misses, not a person of her own rights. We were supposed to live lives of duty to the men in our lives, still, in the 60s as women were taking back their rights and we lived in small areas way outside the women’s equal rights amendment. Our communities and our religion forbade us to do aught. But we began to waken to our own rights.
We began to break free and be safe unto ourselves. We learned to have compassion for our sisters in the world and we began to weep tears of frustration and fear as we stepped out into this new way of being a woman in the 80s. We stepped into our own small acts of courage that, at that time, were huge. It might have taken us decades to finally get that were still “people pleasers”. We began to speak up about our own desires and longings, our needs and dreams. We were taking a stand to make them come true for ourselves. We no longer allowed men to define us. That, sister friends, who came after us, took courage.
It took courage to step out into the world and lie the lives we wished to live. We were willing to risk everything in order to do so. We began to stand up more and more for what we believed in. And, so many of us seldom speak of what society would have had us feel guilty about. How dare we? How dare we not!
Take courage sisterfriends. Those of us who came before you may not have lives you respect or even understand. You may not even be able to relate to what kind of courage that took for us to be strong, independent women of today. We did it for ourselves, but it opened doors for you when you came along.
©Carol Desjarlais 27.1.21
*** the painting is done on the back of a large brown envelop
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