Under Construction

I went to hear Irshad Manji* speak last night at Roy Thomson Hall. She said many inspirational things among which was this: “True freedom is understanding who you are after shaking off all the agendas that others have imposed on you”. These wise words appeared on my radar screen on exactly the same day as my daughter was writing an essay for her English class on a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s a story about a woman who suffers from depression and spends a lot of time ‘resting’ in her bedroom as per her doctor-husband’s advice. She begins to imagine that there is a woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper who is trying to free herself- a woman trying to extricate herself from the gender and societal rules that were stamped all over her body.

I took that to mean that the universe was shouting at me to ‘get free!’ The trouble is I don’t know what I need to free myself from and I don’t know for what purpose I need to be free. I didn’t grow up challenging the roles that society had imposed upon me. I knew that I wanted an education (mostly because I wanted to be free to read widely for as many years as possible), but that my career would never be as important as my husband’s. I knew that I would have children and that I would be the backbone of a happy little nuclear family. I knew that I’d follow my husband wherever his job took us regardless of how content or settled or successful I was with my own life.

I’d heard distant rumblings that some women were dissatisfied with the role of 2nd fiddle, but those rumblings were far off and did not reach my working class world in southern Ontario (although I do remember my mother ‘going on strike’ in the early 1970’s but I figured that was mostly about training my sister and me to help out more around the house when she went back to work.) I do remember some ladies from the National Council of Women coming to my grade 8 class and handing out pins to all the girls on which was a photo of Golda Meir and the words “But can she type?”

But I didn’t dream big. I didn’t need to govern a nation or be a pioneer or challenge any boundaries. I just wanted a good man who worked hard and came from a nice family. I’d raise a bunch of kids while dabbling in some gender appropriate career as a teacher or a social worker or a librarian (surrounded by books!) I didn’t have female role models to demonstrate what a single woman could accomplish on her own... how she might travel or become a guru in her chosen field or be a writer ....or... here it comes....how she might live ALONE. It never occurred to me to do anything but get married after a 4 year degree at the University of Toronto. It never occurred to me to negotiate an identity for myself as an individual. I have basically been avoiding that identity-construction process ever since - for the past 25 years. When you’re busy supporting your husband’s career, relocating for your husband’s career, being pregnant and then mothering, you don’t need to fret about whether or not you’ve reached your own potential or tested your mettle. You can always claim that you once had some dreams and you had some goals but they were thwarted by your obligations to put your family first. In retrospect I think I was either lazy or afraid of failure... and I was happy to let the status quo keep me from figuring out what I was capable of. Happy for a while... that is... until I’d start to feel underused or overqualified, and then get irritable or depressed. And then later, even with a Ph D under my belt, I still thought my finest hour would be as a wife, yet again, and a stepmother who firmly but lovingly brought order to a house where anarchy reigned, who reigned in unruly children like Maria Von Trapp, who pulled together a team for which I’d be captain and cheerleader, who seamlessly stitched together two families against all odds and who was the gentle unsung hero in the eyes of my little blended family. Except it didn’t happen like that at all. My stepchildren resented my rules. My daughter resented sharing space with people who were not of her choosing, and then my husband went and ruined the whole thing by saying I wasn’t a G******girl. I was a failure as a wife and a mother. He sure knew exactly where to strike a blow that would send me into a tailspin.

So now, almost a year later, as the spinning has begun to slow, I still don’t know where to start with myself. Who am I supposed to be now?

* Canadian author, journalist and an advocate of reformist Islam