When he got home and I told him about my failed medical school interview, he laughed his head off. He said in his usual laconic tone, “Well, for Christ’s sake, who knows stuff like that?” When I asked him my birthdate, he shrugged, saying, “We look about the same age.”
I, like Michael, felt the need to do something more applied. Reading Freud and being psychoanalyzed pushed me in the direction of psychology. Even as a kid, I was interested in behaviour and mostly in the extremes of the bell curve. Roy had said if there was one weirdo in Niagara Falls that I didn’t know, then he must have lived under a rock.
When I was a kid, I had been interested in science, and my father gave me all kinds of books on butterflies and lizards. My favourite had been a book called What Is Oxygen? In the summers, we’d collected specimens together and glued them to charts labelled Binomial Nomenclature at Work. When the teenage schism occurred between me and my father, I also left science behind. Michael revived my interest and began giving me all kinds of science to read. I guess it is true that we return to our first influences and inclinations. I was really riveted by the philosophy of science and how science progressed. Being a therapist didn’t look that hard. If you were a psychoanalyst, really all you had to do was sit there and shut up. If you were a child psychiatrist, all you had to do was have a small plastic furnished house and a Fisher-Price plastic farm set, then watch the kid play. As a child, I’d gone to a tiny psychiatrist, incredibly named Dr. Small, for stabbing a bully at school with a compass. All he’d done was show me pictures of a dog named Blacky and asked me how Blacky felt, then charged my parents a fortune.
I found out that to even apply to psychology graduate school I had to have certain prerequisites that I was lacking. It would take me two full years to get them. I decided that was far too long, so I crammed them all into one. I needed to take all kinds of courses on the brain: Neuroanatomy, Perception, Memory, Instinct and Emotions, all kinds of science courses and several maths. The most notable was Univariate and Multivariate Statistics. I found it so stressful that year that once in a statistics exam I got a bloody nose. Michael’s medical opinion was that I’d “blown a gasket.”
>> <<
On his first day of medical school, Michael arrived home looking beleaguered, flopped down in a chair and said, “What’s for dinner?” (Now that we had almost no income we could no longer go to restaurants.)
I had no idea why he was asking me this question. My father had never asked my mother that question in his entire life. I had never asked anyone I had ever lived with that question. I just looked at him, befuddled. “How would I know?”
“Didn’t you ever make something — like on a holiday or Thanksgiving?”
“On Thanksgiving I just gave thanks that I wasn’t cooking.”
He didn’t laugh as he usually did. He looked hungry and annoyed. “What kind of food did your mother make?” He’d never mentioned my mother or my family before.
“She never made a meal in my living memory.”
“Didn’t you have a family?”
“Of course I had a mother and father. He didn’t expect her to cook for Christ’s sake.” While he sat silently looking numb, I snarled, “Who made your food?”
“When I was small, it was my grandmother in Poland. Then we moved to a kibbutz and I lived in the ‘little boys’ house’ without my parents and we all ate dinner in a big compound and some people were assigned to cooking.”
“A kibbutz? Where?”
“Israel.”
He’d lived on a commune? In Israel? I knew where Israel was and I had read about kibbutzim in terms of a social experiment, but what had he been doing there? We’d both had unusual childhoods where neither of us totally depended on our mothers. It is interesting that we found each other and saw things so similarly — that is, until this fractious moment.
Michael made his first criticism of me and I will never forget the words: “I wish that you took more joy in household tasks.”
“How much joy do you take in them? I haven’t seen you whistling the Israeli national anthem while you clean the toilet,” I responded.
“Let’s avoid mudslinging here. We have a problem that needs to be solved.” He got out a piece of paper and began writing numbers on it. “We each have student loans of $2,300 dollars a year. That is around $5,000. We have to live on it. The scholarships only pay the tuition.”
“Okay. So?”
“Well, I have classes from about 9 to 5. I have my Marx study group one night a week and I am supposed to study medicine sometimes.”
“I am taking two years of science courses in one. I have to get all As to get into grad school in psychology. What’s your point?”
“We have a problem. Firstly there is nothing to make dinner with and secondly there is no one to make dinner.” I nodded in agreement, and he continued. “Have you ever opened the oven?”
“Why would I have done that? Who do I look like — the witch in Hansel and Gretel?”
“There is a guy in my cadaver group whose French-Canadian wife makes this amazing food every night of their lives and she even makes dessert. Sometimes he brings in tortière or apple pie with cream and maple syrup in it.”
“God, I wish I was married to her,” I said.
He looked out the window into the back alley that was swarming with cats scrounging in the Dumpster for scraps from the meat market. He continued staring out for a long while and then said, “Do you see we have a problem?”
“No, not exactly. I mean I doubt we’ll starve.” I thought he was pretty fixated on food.
“We can get meat at Elizabeth’s Meat Market next door every day. We can buy a vegetable and a potato.”
“Don’t they have to get cooked?”
“I will cook and buy the food and clean for one whole week and you do the next week. That way we are on one and off one.”
We followed the system faithfully and it worked well. Over the years, it got slightly amended. I didn’t mind cleaning as much as cooking so we often traded chores. Also he had branched out and even used the oven. That cavernous thing scared me, so I stayed on the top of the stove. Michael learned how to make great Indian and Greek food. I learned to buy cleaning ingredients and tidy up. It did take me three years to realize that garbage was emptied on a particular night. My family never had garbage. The first year Michael and I were together, neither of us did the dishes in a conventional way. We just used what was there until they were all dirty and then the one who used the last dish had to wash them. It was usually Michael, because I cheated and drank milk from the carton when there were no more dishes left. We were really exacting about the rules, and I was way better at getting around them than he was. I was great at predicting how many glasses were left in the cupboard.
When it was my week, I was run ragged. I could suddenly see what the women had been doing all these years. Is it any wonder that women hadn’t advanced the sciences? They had to start worrying about dinner as soon as they ate lunch. You had to plan the meal, shop, carry it home, unpack it, cook it, serve it and then clean up the dishes afterward. The second you opened your eyes in the morning, you not only had to think about what you would eat for breakfast, but what the whole household would eat.
It was better for everyone when we were hunters and gatherers. Just eat a berry as you walked along. If your husband brought home an animal, it was great for the tribe, he was proud of it and most importantly he was tickled pink to roast it.
When I called my mother to say hello, I mentioned I’d had a bloody nose during a statistics exam. She, a former math teacher although she only taught for one day, said that you can’t take two statistics courses at one time. You need to know univariate before you can understand multivariate. “For heaven’s sake, your whole brain is going to turn into molten lava and float out your ears. Why don’t you just take life easier? No one is behind y
ou with a whip.” I told her that Michael, “a guy I shared the apartment with,” would tutor me in statistics.
“Who’s Michael? I never heard his name before.”
“I just told you. He lives here — and guess what? He came home from medical school one day and said, ‘What’s for dinner?’”
She laughed that kind of belly laugh that I have always enjoyed so much, saying, “That’s hilarious. For goodness sake, don’t get started on that route. There’s no exit. Be careful. He might want you to type a paper for him and before you know it, you’ll be his medical secretary.”
“We’re sharing the cooking.”
“You mean you are eating off each other’s plates?”
“No! I cook one week and he cooks another.”
“It sounds terrible to me” was all she said.
>> <<
I found myself having similar conversations with my friend Leora, who now lived in Boston and was a researcher at a major Boston hospital connected with Harvard. When Michael and I visited her in 1972, she gave us a copy of a book that a number of her friends had worked on called Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was gobsmacked, as they say on the streets of London, by that book, which actually wrote about women’s health from a woman’s perspective. It made the point that a lot of male doctors, and almost all were male at the time, had no idea what caused most females’ pain. I was thrilled to realize I wasn’t a classic hysteric when it mentioned PMS as though it was a real entity.
The book described how birth control pills worked, giving the reader all the pros and cons. I’d never had any idea there were cons. The second edition included letters from women who had all kinds of advice they had learned by trial and error. There were letters from women across the country who were fed up with women’s health information being disseminated by drug companies and researchers from a male perspective to male doctors. Suddenly I felt part of a movement, since I viscerally shared similar sentiments of so many of the disgruntled females. I thought of my gynecologist who had handed me a disk that looked strangely like a child’s blue and yellow rattle. “If you don’t want children, take these,” he said, then his nurse pulled out the white paper sheet from under me as a hint that my time was up.
The book talked about how we needed to see the ways we had been programmed to conform to a submissive role that was not really in our best interests. I put this information together with The Female Eunuch, which basically said that women had been cut off from their libidos. Germaine Greer said women are like farm animals that are castrated to serve the profit motive of the farmer. Women have become leery of sexuality because it is in the interest of society to make them passive, not only sexually but in life in general. I had felt this to be true for all my life, but had never been able to put it into words. I had just known that my active nature had been universally frowned upon by society at large and would have been extinguished if my parents had not applauded it.
I went to some meetings of the NAC (National Action Committee on the Status of Women), and through them I found that many women were in consciousness-raising groups to attempt to “deprogram” themselves. I decided to go to a feminist group that I saw advertised in Guerilla, thinking I would finally find like-minded women and that we could share our histories. When I arrived, I found twenty-five mostly middle-class women sitting on folding chairs in a circle. Half of them were married and one quarter had children. Some of the real movers and shakers of the group were fugitive SDS sympathizers who had come to Canada from New York and Boston hoping for political asylum. None of them shaved their legs or wore a shred of makeup.
The majority of the group said they didn’t want to end up like their mothers, who catered to everyone else’s needs. They talked about their mothers as though they’d had the most unimaginably terrible lives. They described their mothers as powerless, and how quiet but deadly anger had oozed out of their every pore. The more educated the mother, the angrier she was. I had no idea what they were talking about.
Each week they made pacts to work at not always taking responsibility for other people’s hunger or unhappiness or unpressed clothes. The women in the group seemed to share this preoccupation. I had never taken on any of these issues as my responsibility, nor had my mother. Again I had no idea what they were talking about. My mother said when she got an iron as a wedding gift she threw it out, saying she was afraid she’d use it. She said God invented dry cleaners for a reason.
I would sporadically jump into the fray and say things like, “Just don’t make dinner.” They would reply in an exasperated tone, “Then who will do it?” or “You just don’t get it, do you?” I had no idea why they thought all this was their job.
Everyone in the group was born the late ’40s or early ’50s and it seemed that they were rewarded for being quiet and nurturing and they were sick of it. I had never been rewarded for that, so I felt I was another species — a duck in a room of fish. I was in the right pond but the wrong animal.
I would come home each week and tell Michael the group’s resolution for the week. We always found them hilarious. One week, I tore in blasting, “I refuse to cook day and night any longer, and listen, buster, there are no more casseroles in the fridge when I’m away. It’s over, done, finished!”
As I sat in “the women’s circle,” as it was reverentially called, drinking inka — a barley, rye, chicory and sugar beet drink (coffee was an artificial stimulant) — I was surprised and sadly alienated by the domestic concerns of the group. They talked about how they would stop pleasing men. I asked one striking woman who had jumbo hair knotted on top of her head with a stick going through it like an African queen, “What do you mean exactly by ‘pleasing men’?” I honestly had no idea.
“Are you a lesbian?” she asked.
“No.” Why would she ask that?
After that, I decided to listen instead of talk. Most of the women had their first sexual experiences far younger than I had. The majority of the group had been pleasing men sexually since they’d become sexually active, which for most of them was around the age of sixteen. There seemed to be two sexual themes in the group: the married ones wanted to have less sex, and the ones who were dating wanted to have better sex. Almost everyone complained that sex was only good for the male.
I wondered why women didn’t just ask for what would give them sexual pleasure. As I said to the group, it was like going to a restaurant, looking a menu and telling the waiter, “Surprise me.” The response of the group was interesting. The married ones said that their husbands would feel inadequate if they said anything other than “Wow, that was great.” Some other women, who I thought were brave for speaking up, said they had no idea what to ask for.
Myrna, from Brooklyn, said, “Ya have to know what you want, before ya ask for it, right?” Then she suggested that we should pass around a magnifying mirror and all learn the sexual parts of our bodies and identify parts that are responsible for sexual arousal. I had read about this in Our Bodies, Ourselves and thought it was a great idea. At least it had some biological validity. It was informative and devoid of rhetoric. At the end of the evening, we’d actually know something. So we all took turns looking at our vaginas in the mirror. When we each looked at our clitoris, most of the women in the group were amazed that we had a sexual organ and were shocked that it really looked like a miniature penis.
When I came home and told Michael we all looked at our sexual organs in a magnifying mirror, he said, “Stop making up crap,” and went back to reading his Gray’s Anatomy.
Clearly I felt like I was from another planet when it came to personal development; however, on a societal level I related to a lot of what was said. More than two-thirds of the group had had a sexual attack of some sort in their lifetime, and several of the group members were incest survivors, which shocked me at the time. As we each told our stories, I began to realize that I, like the rest of the group, had blamed myself for my
attempted rape. It was remarkable to me how the majority of us had been subtly blamed by the authorities at the time of the crime. When I told the group that the police officer had asked if I had been naked in the shower, they all laughed. But the story was no longer funny. I began to cry. I sobbed, and I realized how much I’d absorbed that officer’s disdain.
As the years went on, I saw that many of those women who’d been in my consciousness-raising group had moved into government and become big players in the Women’s Bureau, Ontario Women’s Directorate and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Some became lawyers and started feminist law firms and later became judges. As a psychologist, I was an expert witness in a lawsuit and before I gave my testimony, the judge, a woman, leaned down, laughed and whispered to me, “Didn’t I meet your sexual organs in 1973?”
After thirty years, our group had a reunion at a resort up north. Some women now had their own grown children. The ones that had daughters were telling those of us who didn’t that these young women now think feminism is passé. They had no idea why women were angry. One woman quoted her teenage daughter as saying, “Mom, those feminist battles are such ancient history.” In fact it was two generations ago. It was another era. It is hard to explain that without those battles fought and without those laws in place, our daughters would not be sitting in law and medical schools that are now almost fifty percent female. The problem with having rights is you have no idea how precious or how precarious they are unless you’ve struggled for them. I guess that’s the nature of historical change. The hard-fought battles won by one generation are only boring history to the next — but I suppose that’s what we were fighting for.
Coming Ashore Page 27