Monday, January 22, 2024

The Wanting of A Rightful Place.

 


 

“In that small town of old women and angry men;
They teach girls how to speak in a lower tone,
How to always nod their heads and never be brave enough to say No.
They teach them not to walk alone in an empty street.
They give them hundreds of rules for how to love, live and even dream.
They color their worlds in black and white; so that they couldn’t paint ones in their own.
And those who dare to ask questions, to raise voices, to standup for themselves, to be their wild most authentic selves, and to hit back are being my dear called hoes , bitches and men wanna be .
In that small town of old women and angry men; to be born a woman is an enough reason for you to be in an endless war with society and its trashy beliefs…”

Samiha Totanji

We, women, born between 1945 and 1955 are official Baby Boomers.  We rebelled and enjoyed free love; were the impetus of thousands of Self-help, empowerment, litigation groups, to gain more and more equality/power; and broke free of left-over Victorian norms for women to be barefoot and pregnant, in the kitchen, subservient to the man of the house, and would no longer be seen and not heard.  We believed and became privileged and ended up uncertain as to what cultural norms were now in place.  The stifling old prejudices and prohibitions for women were shoved to the side and we wrote a new cultural story for women, but that led to a problem.  We had no compass to follow.  It became a bit of a free-for-all with no real cultural restraints about this new feminine freedom. There were splinter groups who tried to define women’s roles and as with all things, we may have gone too far, or not far enough within global aspects of women’s roles. 

We, Boomer Women, have raised our children, are raising grandchildren., and have comer to more wisdom and continued freedoms that are at risk every day.  We have grown up under the umbrella of railing against rules and re constantly being manipulated to gain back “the good old days of the pre-60s” by Patriarchy that is embedded so deeply that we still have to march to drums and stand on soap boxes, stiletto-hell our way up labor ladders, and can compete with the best of them , yet, imbalance in leaderships of our country still would like to keep us in our place… an undefined ‘place’ because we are the new age women who , maybe, forgot to have end goal mission statements or futuristic directives  and so we tend to be flailing in a sea of undeclared goals we have no idea of nor how to reach them.  So, we have turned to self-acceptance, inner directives that are unique to every individual and w are in splintered groups of women trying to reach some utopia...an undefined utopia. We continue to be in transition with our very roles in continuing transition.

We have not prepared our young women following after us.  They will most likely break away from what we deemed ‘traditional” for us baby boomers and clump into another group of splintered groups trying to their own undefined roles in society.  They, too, will rant and rave at patriarchal authority.  They would ’stay in their place’, too, but there I no defined ‘place’ for them either.  We all live in a fractured world.  The best we can do is find a path we feel right to follow and quietly work on our interpersonal skills so that we are more resilient. At least that... more resilient and less resistant to change. We al need a sense of purpose, a sense of being ‘enough’, a sense of empowerment.  May we find and teach those women following after us, they way home. 

©Carol Desjarlais 1.21.24

 "She's Leaving Home"

"She (We gave her most of our lives)
is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives)
home (We gave her everything money could buy)
She's leaving home after living alone for so many years (Bye, bye)."

"She (What did we do that was wrong?)
is having (We didn't know it was wrong)
fun (Fun is the one thing that money can't buy)
Something inside that was always denied for so many years (Bye, bye)
She's leaving home (Bye, bye)."

 

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