In 2016 I became a parent to a premature infant. I was overwhelmed, in love and unsure how I had never known the depths and details of what was involved with child-rearing. Like many people in duress, I was looking to point the figure, and I found the Patriarchy to blame for my suffering and confusion. Here is my correspondence with it.
Attn: The Patriarchy
℅ My Father
To blame the patriarchy is to point my finger at all the men, who intentionally or not, have made me feel invisible. It must begin, as all my stories seem to, with my own father. My father who I loved and who is gone, who was absent when I needed him most and who left the world before we got to fully articulate how we loved each other.
He was the perfect model of the imperfect patriarch. He was the most adept magician when it came to making me disappear. Meals appeared before him and dirty plates moved away from him in waves pushed along by the invisible hands of my mother, my grandmother and later his many young girlfriends. I learned to serve him invisibly enough to catch the occasional smile or pat on the head. In the kitchen we whispered of his moods and as a child I wavered around him, ready to hand a remote control or telephone.
When my mother met his mother for the first time, she was dumbfounded when she saw my father sit on the porch and watch his as his own mother carry two buckets full of water across the garden.
When he finally left us I folded within myself blame for their divorce. Inept at sports, clumsy with my hands, bad at chess. I was not a good son to my father, and perhaps that was my first experience of girlhood.
The echo of his booming voice and the pervasive fear that came with his comings and going, left our reformed household a cavernous outline of where he hurt us most. And in that space, we rebuilt ourselves, my mother and I. We held each other's hands, and moved each others hair out of one another's eyes.
Attn: The Patriarchy
℅ the people who don’t think there is one
A few of the things that you assume about a woman who writes a series of letters to the patriarchy are true; I don’t shave my legs or believe in God, I hate wearing makeup and heels, I am no fun at night time and I have opinions about things like different types of citrus and Terry Gross. And yet, I am also married to a man, I have been seen slinking around in sexy black dresses, have put sparkles on my eyelids and enjoyed what the sunlight does to my hair when it is swooping over one side of my face. I have liked luring men and toying with them, have felt desired and desire. I have sometimes made myself sweeter, dumber, skinnier and quieter. I have other times been defiant, annoying, shrill, bitchy and yes, bossy. I have agonized over which way the pendulum will swing almost every day of my life.
I have been a woman wrapped up tightly in my career, so tightly I have sneered at the round, pink person next to me as she rattled off reasons about day care closing early and left the office in the early afternoon. It was so easy in the gray room in my mid twenties, full of black buzzing machines and men, so many men, to hate her. To make a note to myself that when I became a mother, if I did, I wouldn’t let it make me leave work early.
So I can sense that hate, because it really is that, it’s a complete disapproval of somebody else being, I can sense it so clearly in the tone, in the lifted eyebrow, in the pause after I answer the question “What do you do?”
What do I do? The words tossed like rocks across a lake. Skip once or twice and then sink.
Attn: The Patriarchy
℅ My Son
Oh, Abraham. We named you after the father of all religions, the great patriarch! And yet here I am, trying to yell at the patriarchy. In this year of feeling crushed by the stupidity of men in power, I’m also eclipsed by the love that came with you into the world.
The patriarchy would have me be your servant, be your father’s servant. Millions of women are expected to cook, to clean, to soothe, to heal, to hold, to love the men in their lives before all else. Before themselves. In our house, you will see a mother with a partner who does his share of cleaning, cooking. A mother who does her share of dreaming, of having ambitions and providing for you.
In my dreams I buy a house for us made of my poems and paintings. It will be smaller and sweeter than the house I would have built for you with the cold hard cash earned from the marketing job I quit before you were born. You may have less things, but you will be raised by a complete woman, full of love for you and for herself. The walls of our home will be laid brick by brick with your father and I, equal partners like both the sun and the moon are equal partners in the sky.
Attn: The Patriarchy
℅ Myself
To blame the patriarchy is to point the finger at myself, at all the ways it has wrapped itself around my mind. It begins with how I second guess myself. It’s all the times I’ve said yes to things that made me uncomfortable, because I have learned to put other people’s needs before mine. The patriarchy is in a million mini-acts of self-erasure. I have performed them in classrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms.
It’s the professor who encouraged me to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship, but me deciding I wouldn’t get it anyway. It’s having twenty thousand words of a book and fifty pretty good poems, which have yet to be seen by more than a handful of people. It’s being too afraid to even propose the idea that they are worthy of being shared. It’s trembling every time I do share something at a writing group, on the internet, in email. It’s feeling terrified that people will hate it. It’s the actual trembling.
For me, being a woman has come with this tax. I often wake up in the middle of the night and am flooded by my shortcomings as a mother, as a partner. When I take stock of my last year, my stomach sinks. The yard is a mess. I barely cook anymore. I push dirty hair out of my face and feel the weight of a my own estranged body. It has swelled with life and many gallons of liquids pressing against each other through membranes of organs I would never think I would feel. (So this is what it’s like when my bladder and my stomach touch, or my heart and my lung?) I search for calm.
I imagine the Morskie Oko, a lake in the southern mountains of Poland, which means Eye of the Sea. I went for the first time just as my parents were separating, when I was seven years old. The lake is famous for how deep and cold it is, and I like to imagine the rocks at the bottom, catching just the slightest bit of daylight. The darkness and stillness comfort me. I try to find the part of me that is that pure. Is it in my gut? In the back of my throat? I feel a smooth black stone in my mouth, cold against my tongue.
This is where I go when I am afraid to speak, I go to the purity inside me. And I spit out the rock.
Attn: The Patriarchy
℅ The Media
We were perfect. Without makeup or the right lighting, just as women walking around a forest, we were perfect. And then you sold us impossible faces, with unreasonable hair. You put us in shoes that made it so we can’t run or sometimes walk. Then you told us to hurry up. Then to sit down. Finally, to stay home. I blame you for excluding women of all shapes, colors and sizes from your channels. I blame you for trying to program beauty and thinness and perfect skin and youth into our self-image. Show us smart, strong women. Ugly and fat women. Show us trans women and not women who also aren't men. Show us the beautiful in-betweens. Show us mothers. Show us what child care looks like, what breastfeeding looks like, what juggling work and family looks like. Let women be the heroes. Let the fur on our legs be there forever.