In my previous piece, I mused about whether one soul, or a more fluid equivalent that I called a “spiritual essence,” could experience the temporal world through more than one window, i.e. biological body, at the same time.
At times I wonder if the inverse is true: can two souls experience the temporal realm through the same body?
I do have a yin and a yang, and my yin is nothing like my yang.
How is it possible that the same person can be the author of such different websites? I also author Pam’s Old-Fashioned Kitchen, where I revel in 1950s cooking and 1950s table manners. I also swoon with sentimentality about the times when married women were formally addressed as “Mrs. Husband’s-Name Smith.”
Two Very Different Selves
To the feminist me, the cringe! All the while, my yang waxes nostalgic when an old 1950s home economics film touted college degrees in Home Ec to “prepare her for her very important job of being Mrs. Johnson.”
Cringe! Yet, Home Ec degrees did allow women of the 1950s to break through the mortarboard ceiling, bringing women onto college campuses — a realm that had previously been an almost exclusively male domain.
Today, women outnumber men two to one on many college campuses. Scheme intended to domesticate women: backfired.
The Traditionalist Self Emerges
During springtime of 2012, I wrote the following at a newspaper blog:
It’s nothing much; just something light, airy, a little secret and a little silly – and perhaps a voice from a long departed mom left behind in the brainstem of a rebel female thinker.
While the feminist me who grew up in the mid-morning of the women’s movement rejoices in the successes to which she and her sisters cling tenaciously, a deeply traditional side whispers with dampness in her eyes, “don’t forget me.”
I never did.
In the jungle of liberty that knows no ceiling, no floor, and no walls, I find myself occasionally enchanted by a curiously wistful memory of that which we liberated women writhed and shook so furiously to divest ourselves: a simple cage, a life whose worry is limited by its own confinement, to close my eyes and know that the world rests upon someone else’s shoulders.
There still exist small remnants of the country where women are often addressed in formal settings by our husband’s first names – a dissolution of one’s public personal identity that, indeed, this feminist could not long tolerate.
Yet my inner Betty Crocker cannot resist being distantly allured by the world left behind by the departing penumbra of a world that I lived in but, as a child, not quite of. The men of the house earned the bread while we, a.k.a. “the ladies,” got together and worked on a quilt for a while while the hostess enjoyed the honor of serving afternoon tea, and got back home in time to bake a hamburger and corn casserole to palliate our husbands’ hard day’s work.
Donning my apron, I’d dive in.
Then I’d throw a baby shower for the latest of the expectants, remembering always that the soup is to be passed from the left to the right. With intermittent melancholy, I’d remember how I, Mrs. John Smith (good heavens), concealing yet not denying the wanderlust of a race Hemi in my heart, declined my turn under the shower head.
I truly could visit that world for a week, to vacation in its prepared simplicity. But I could not stay; it’s the freedom to choose and to taste that piques my curiosity in the first place. Without that freedom I would suffer, ponder, lament, and incubate discontent; I would peer beyond the bars and initiate the women’s movement all over again.
It’s a beautifully simple world, and I share the beauty in it that women who freely choose that life see for themselves. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the cliche goes, and it ever edifies me to strive to behold.
But before long I could come back home – to my home – but not without packing my doffed apron, my Joy of Cooking handbook, and a boxful of the scent of the chicken liver lyonnaise dinner that I had fried for my husband of a different reality.
I’d remember; I’d smile; and yet I’d be grateful to be back home, and to be me, once again.
I would love to blame it on menopause, because that whirlwind of nostalgia coincided with it. But my old-fashioned yang soon took up long term residency in my soul, tempering but never seeking dominance over my feminist soul. The soul of a tradwife lives alongside the soul of a feminist in the same body, and somehow we manage to get along.
I enjoy how it enables me to easily befriend and find common values with people who are ideologically my opposites. To see beauty through the eyes of others allows me to see more beauty. The warm smile that I give when someone extols the virtues of traditional gender roles is genuine and authentic.
Meanwhile, the other me covers her eyes and plugs her ears.
Seasons change
But seasons are changing in my soul, again. The restive feminist me is back in the driver’s seat.
As I concluded in my little piece from 2012, I am back home, and me, once again.
The elements, ingredients, conditions, and societal dissatisfaction with the direction of our civilization are coming together for a fertile environment for a new liberation movement — not just for women, but for everyone.
The momentum is developing. Let’s get ahead of it and do this right.