The good old days

I am composed of so many layers that figuring out what shaped me into the person I am today would be more complicated than discerning the number of people who have replaced the gold leaf on an ancient, but carefully maintained family mirror.

Told to love myself by pop culture while gently admonished to be aware that parts of me are unmentionable, untouchable, and downright ugly is a conundrum that I believe many intelligent women of my generation face.

I grew up knowing that women are capable and strong, creative in practical as well as decorative ways, but that femininity required me to appear as small, and delicate as possible, to be ludicrously ignorant of obvious things, and compliant beyond endurance. The worst label in the world was to be a loud mouth, crude, obnoxious woman.  Sometimes the worst thing was simply to act like a girl.

Nature made me long legged and tall. My father saw me as "healthy." My mother saw me as too big to be really feminine.  I had to be smart and that meant smart enough to know when to play dumb.

I grew up on the cusp of the liberated woman.  That would have been wonderful if I hadn't tried so dutifully hard to be "what I was supposed to be."  Talk about conflicts.

Those good old days where the idea of nursing a baby in any kind of company was abhorrent, where, even if we had had social networking, we would never have dreamed of putting up pictures of ourselves in provocative positions, because not wearing a bra when you were flatter than your mother's pancake turner, was still considered flaunting yourself in public, were tantamount to running the gauntlet in almost every area of life.  No matter what we did -- somebody objected to it.

My father loved educated women, but they fell into two categories: the ones who stayed home and raised children and the ones who never married and lived for their careers.  Most of the people I grew up with felt the same way.  You couldn't have both and do justice to either one. I suspect he was right, but the standards for both were higher then.  Mothers did what people expect daycare and school to do now and career women had to perform twice as good as any man to be considered passable. Today most people have no choice and we have altered both the situations and the standards to fit the need.

Elderly people were, and often still are, forced into the position of great gray-haired toddlers devoid of the intelligence, dreams and desires they've had all their lives. Older women were seen as pathetic people who needed to be grateful for the attention given to them now that they were physically less attractive by the standards of youth. That is changing, but not fast enough and it is going through the same growing pains everything else is.  You don't have to act 25 when you are 75.  You don't have to act at all.  You should be wonderful just the way you are and people need to take the time to discover who that is.

There have always been people who refused to change, who whine and dither and blame, and that will never change.  But in the good old days they were acceptable as long as they stayed in their designated rut.  I see that changing today. The ruts are shallower and there are opportunities galore for those who want them.

All these thoughts fill my cracks and crevices.  They are part of who I was and who I am. I look back on the good old days and I'm glad they have been evolving.  There are a few things that I think might have been a little better, but they are outweighed by the circumstances surrounding them. Change takes time and nothing takes more time to change than the way people think.