Lynda and I met when we were age nineteen. We soon learned that we came from the same kind of backgrounds. Multiple fathers, alcoholism, knock down drag out family fights, never enough money or food. Some would refer to our growing up experiences as hard times while others would call it trailer trash. Linda and I prefer the word colorful.
Whether it was our innate shyness, our lack of self-esteem, our passive temperaments or our then excessively controlling husbands, we bonded immediately. Perhaps it was our yet undisclosed backgrounds of poverty that created a kind of familiarity of knowingness that began our attachment. We also shared tough task masters for mothers who wanted more for their daughter than they themselves received.
For example, Lynda’s mother made her practice walking one hour every day with a coat hanger stuffed down her shirt to perfect her posture. My mother simply whacked me in the stomach as a reminder to stand up straight and suck it in. As adult women we are profoundly grateful to our mothers for those harsh lessons in shoulders back walking as we similarly acquired excellent posture.
We were cautioned against being too smart. Not a problem for me with my failing high school grades. But Lynda was gifted. She had exceedingly high IQ scores. One time some people from a gifted program came to Lynda’s house to enroll her in a scholarship program. After they left Lynda was in serious trouble with her mother who screamed, “What have you done now Lynda Louise, I have told you and told you that men do not like women who are too smart.”
That was just the way it was in those days. Looks, stand up breasts, the way a woman walked, stockings with seams had everything to do with “catching a man”. In fact, our mothers’ greatest demonstrations of love to pass on to us, their beloved daughters, were the skills with which to survive in a harsh patriarchal world. Snagging a man, any man, was the only sure way to survive. That was the highest form of success in the minds of our mothers who themselves had few available options.
Lynda and I also had the influence of our grandmothers’ values as both grandmothers lived with us or us with them. Lynda’s grandmother was cosmetically made up from the tip of her toes to the coif of her Henna colored hair. Lipstick my grandmother’s lips never touched. Their obvious differences aside, they were like ever present Yin/Yang bookends.
Lynda’s grandmother was sometimes referred to as “the meanest woman on earth”. She would tell the local cops to @#&*#^, should they request that she not drive on the neighbor’s lawn. My grandmother, on the other hand was referred to as, “The meekest women on earth”. The only thing that my grandmother ever molested was the filter tips on her cigarettes. Sometimes, to calm her nerves I presume, she would tear off the filter of a Cool cigarette and unravel it bit by bit as if she were mindlessly gutting a disgusting animal.
My grandmother, rosary beads in hand, knelt before her home made altar every night of her life worshiping her beloved Jesus. Lynda’s grandmother, on the other hand, never missed the traveling revival meetings; the more boisterous and condemning the better. Both grandmothers touted the love and forgiveness of God, while fearing the ever present evilness of the devil. Yet they also shared a kind of perverse love for wrestling. In particular they loved the outrageous cross-dresser/ wrestler Gorgeous George. The more vicious the body slamming during his bodacious wrestling matches the better they liked it.
Lynda’s grandmother actually went to the wrestling matches even once getting into a physical fight with the man sitting in front of her because he would not move out of her line of vision. My grandmother sat in front of our small black and white television set. She placed her elbows upon her knees having stretched far and wide to get her arms around her large bosom. Then, with rosary beads in one hand and a cigarette in the other she commenced to yell, “Kill him, kill him.”
Perhaps this form of sadistic voyeurism was the only legitimate way for church-going women of their day to publicly release the pent up darker side of their psyches.
As Lynda and I reflect on our long ago childhoods we are deeply grateful for these caring, albeit, eccentric women.
Gratefully our forty some years of friendship was long ago cemented by mutual growth and blessed laughter as we salute the mother’s and grandmother’s upon whose shoulders we stand. It is a wonderful thing to have another human being lovingly hold your history so close to their heart.
Dawn D Novotny
104-C Hilltop Drive
Sequim, WA. 98382
360 683-7624
http://WWW.beyondtheparts.com
Dawn Novotny LCSW, MTS, CDP, CP, is a clinician, teacher, author, and workshop leader. She is in private practice in Sequim, WA. since 1987. She specializes in systems theory focusing both on the “external” (family, cultural, roles) as well as the “internal” family system (internalized roles, parts, archetypes, ego states, conflicts, etc.). As a clinical practitioner of psychodrama, sociomety and group therapy, Dawn utilizes a variety of action methods. She conducts workshops in CA. and WA. She holds Masters Degrees in Clinical Social work, and theology. She was an adjunct professor at Seattle University. She is a nationally certified psychotherapist-dramatist.
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