Hold Onto the Light: Smile!

[sartorias]

This campaign, participated in by a slew of fellow writers to raise consciousness of mental health and depression related issues, has my entry here.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

I realize that I'm of a certain age only to people who're younger than I, and that I'm still kind of young to people who are less ambiguously of a certain age, as it were--but your piece resonates very much.

I have some similar-age friends/acquaintances who were supposed to have escaped some of these expectations by the fact that we were born during second-wave feminism, but the quick half-smiles and demurrals are still there amidst piles of scrapbooking, competitive baking and home decor ideas, and a sense that one cannot be comfortable with oneself because there's always one more obligation to fulfill. Damned if you're a mom and "staying" at home as though always bound to it, or working part time, or working full time and thus somehow betraying your offspring: there is no acceptable space unless you can push some of the expectations away and make that space yourself. One more DIY project. :P

(I don't feel cornered personally, I should add, though I wasn't expecting that many words to come out! Apparently I have Feelings on this

[sartorias]

Nodding in agreement . . .

[thistleingrey]

I think it is genuinely better on average for my generation than for the half- or full-span generational slices that precede it: that there are choices at all helps (though the new badness is that someone has somehow chosen wrongly, or couldn't "choose" how to get herself out of a difficult situation). Still a ways to go.

[sartorias]

Oh, much, much better. There ARE choices. Yesh. Too many women the generation above mine were given the choice of marriage or single nursing of old relatives. Like Britt, who had fallen in love with a friend's father when they were in high school, but her parents told her that she had to nurse ailing grandmother . . . and when granny finally died after ten or fifteen years, she had her parents to nurse--her two older brothers made it clear that was her duty because she was single, and had nothing else to do, and nowhere else to go. The parents died a year or so before her fiftieth high school reunion, which my friend's dad attended, hoping to see her again--and the two of them fell in love all over again. He swept her off, married her, and she went from the penury her brothers had kept her in (her unpaid years meant no social security) to being able to travel for the first time in her life, and be with her beloved . . . but she was so worn out that she only lasted about three years

not nearly enough

[anonymous]

This is an attitude that is (sadly) stitched through the culture. I remember seeing Spielberg's movie AI: he based it on Pinocchio and although it was way more into violence and unnecessarily violent coercion than I feel any way comfortable with, I was okay with it until the end when you find out that kneeling in front of the Blue Fairy for umpti-ump years gets the little boy ONE DAY of his wished for mommy(!). And it ruined the whole tale, because the implication that any little thing is worth years and years of selfless devotion made a mock of the whole story. (Not to mention that if the character had actually any pretense of being a Real Boy, then he would have understood that creating a being for his own pleasure--no matter how much he deserved that pleasure--that is going to die after that one day is not a good definition of being 'real'). (Or on second thought, is it? Looking at the story of the brothers forcing the girl into family care, I suspect (sadly)that it is all too real.)

Re: not nearly enough

[sartorias]

Yeah . . . I had many problems with that movie and my husband thought it wonderful. To me, that demonstrated how differently we viewed certain kinds of interactions, expectations, and motivations.