About Women
To those that stand behind a good man.
There’s nothing more adorable than a couple that makes it to old age. I’m lucky enough that my parental grandparents are one such example – picture an enchanting cottage style home with a magical garden visited every holiday as a child to be welcomed by the smell of fresh coffee and scones. Never mind the fact that they were in the middle of a bustling corner, the ferns gating the small corner lot took care of that. Too bad we can’t all sustain a path towards building a quality legacy. It’s a shame – I couldn’t ever be a part of becoming a part of the problem as to why more couples don’t make it to the golden years together.
My stance on offering relationship advice is to avoid it all together. We’re all entitled to forging our own path by developing independent opinions and attitudes. The worst thing that can happen is that a serpent-like meddler comes between a couple by planting the seed of mistrust. I wish I could say that I’m free of such sin but I recognize that I’m far from it and I’d like to shed light as to some of the reasons why I might appear that way – essentially, the same thing as being it.
In chronological order, here’s a quick summary of the evidence I’d like to submit for my defense: 1) my parents engaged in a love-hate-relationship introducing domestic violence into my home during my formative years, 2) I decided to have relations with an older man that offered me crack cocaine at the age of seventeen and with whom I decided to go ahead and have kids with in hopes of becoming a positive influence in his life to no avail, and 3) I dated a fancy pants auditor that impregnated me twice and gave me STD’s – what I never thought – only to have wasted another five years of my life with the “wrong man.”
Thus, it was that I concluded that I couldn’t count on men to elevate me to my true level of worth. Hey, maybe third times’ the charm. But first I had some choices to make. Namely, I knew that I wasn’t the martyr type that set myself up for my own failure only to later play the clingy victim. I certainly wasn’t a spited, bickering nag that would give up on life and drag others down. And, I wasn’t anything in between. My experiences are to simply serve as a lesson for how to approach my future relations in terms of creating a blank slate that will only lead to positivity with my future encounters. However, to succeed, I’m up against the tone set by those women in a leadership position.
Perhaps because I was coached as a child to be brainy and to adapt to a natural beauty, perhaps because I’ve always been smaller in physical size, or perhaps because I lack the interest, I’m never in competition with other women for the attention of men. Rather, I’d like to be noticed for my lasting qualities. Together with my life experiences, I have the strong conviction that my route remains becoming that strong woman behind that-good-man. Despite constantly going against the tide that I can let become the theme of my life as my immediate examples would, I remain optimistic. My guess is that so were the multitude of women during the women’s rights movement.
When I look to women in leadership, I expect that they can express solidarity for women with my point of view because I believe my views are what honor the progress that women have made in today’s modern society. To be aesthetic and value beauty is one thing; another is to become a willing and mindless object for others to own. My reasoning wants to believe the former but my heart is prepared against the latter.