Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 45

100 Years Ago

One hundred years ago today, the guns fell silent.

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Newfoundland War Memorial. Photo credit: Tom Clift

They fell silent, that is, on the battlefields of the First World War. A last few men died on the morning of November 11, in response to orders that the men at the top had already decided were meaningless. Then, at the pre-arranged time of 11:00 a.m., everyone stopped shooting. It was so simple, after all: just stop shooting.

Of course, the guns started up again soon enough. In other places, and then, twenty-one years later, in the same places. They have rarely fallen silent, ever since we invented guns. Before that, we had quieter ways to kill each other, but we’ve never stopped.

Every Remembrance Day, we pause in our different ways to remember all the dead and wounded in all our wars. We remember on the day that commemorates the end of the once-called “Great” War, November 11, 1918. And after all the bloody conflicts of this century, that First World War still captures our imagination.

It wasn’t the deadliest war of the century. But falling as it did between the invention of the machine gun and the widespread use of airplanes for bombing, it was perhaps the first war with death on such a horrific scale, and the last where that scale was still possible for the human mind to grasp. It was a conflict that illustrated in vivid colours the bravery and suffering of ordinary fighting men, and the vanity and stupidity of those who ruled them. It was a war that need never have been fought: a petty power struggle that cost millions of lives.

Due at least in part to the bungled peace process that followed that November 11 armistice, the “war to end all wars” was followed by its inevitable successor two decades later. This time, Germany was led by a villian of such comic-book awfulness that few questioned the necessity of war, either at the time or in retrospect. The horrors of Nazi Germany, especially the horrors of the Holocaust, were so intolerable that we could forgive or overlook the horrors committed by our “good guys” in the attempt to stop them.

And once again, millions died — brave soldiers, and probably some cowardly soldiers too, and lots and lots of civilians who had never made the choice to go to war, but found war exploding all around them or dropping on their heads.

The power struggles among the victors of that war led to the world I was born into: the world of Cold War, where humans, for the first time, developed weapons theoretically capable of destroying all life on the planet. For forty-five years, while smaller conflicts flared and died and killed around that planet, the great powers played a long game of chicken over who would dare use these deadly weapons.

In the end, they tired of that game. As a species, we seem to have decided it’s less work to destroy the planet by greed and consumption and laziness than by dropping bombs. And largely, we have outsourced the business of killing in large numbers to terrorists and “rogue states.”

We didn’t get rid of the bombs, of course. We kept them around, just in case.

For all the Great Literature it produced, my favourite World War One novel will always be the first one I read, L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside. At the end of that novel, nineteen-year-old Rilla records in her journal the words of her recently-returned soldier brother:

“‘We’re in a new world,’ Jem says, ‘and we’ve got to make it a better one than the old. That isn’t done yet, though some folks think it ought to be. The job isn’t finished — it isn’t really begun. The old world is destroyed and we must build up the new one. It will be the task of years. I’ve seen enough of war to realize that we’ve got to make a world where wars can’t happen.'”

The fictional Jem Blythe speaks these hopeful words in 1919; Montgomery published them in 1921.

In 1921, Adolf Hitler was named leader of the Nazi Party in the Germany.

It’s hard to know what to celebrate, 100 years after the end of the war that began all the other wars. In that century we have made so much progress as a species. Diseases have been eradicated. Advances in communication and transportation have made possible things that were only dreams before. Huge groups of people who were considered barely human in 1918 now enjoy the same rights under the law as wealthy white men did in 1918. People are better educated. Workers have more rights. Poverty and infant mortality are declining almost everywhere.

And yet. The climate is changing and we can’t be bothered to figure out how to stop it. And in the face of a more and more globalized world, where we all have to deal with each other, an unimaginable number of people in “free” countries (sometimes whole governments) have responded by turning inward: condemning the Other, boosting an imagined racial superiority, building metaphorical and literal walls. In World History, I teach “nationalism” as a deadly underlying cause of World War One. After a century of mostly moving away from me-first nationalism, more and more countries and leaders — including the president of the United States — are now proudly declaring themselves “nationalists.” “Our people first, and screw the planet and all those other, lesser people on it.”

I was raised to believe two stories about the history of the world.  One was taught to me in church, the other by the surrounding humanist culture. Both were, in their way, hopeful.

The church taught me that the world would get worse and worse and then God would dramatically intervene to save us. The culture taught me that the world would get better and better and we would solve all our problems and save ourselves.

Looking back 100 years to the day the guns went (briefly) silent, wondering about those soldiers who died to help build a world they could not imagine, I can find hard evidence to support both beliefs — which means neither feels completely true. The world is getting much, much worse, and much, much better at the same time, and while we have not seen evidence that God is going to dramatically intervene, we also, to be frank, haven’t shown much sign of saving ourselves either.

There are plenty of people who believe neither story: who simply accept despair and defeat. Who look back at 1918, and all the war since, and say that it will never get better. That we can rely on neither divine help nor human goodness to break the endless cycle of violence and hate.

100 years after the horror of the trenches…

70 years after Kristallnacht…

29 years after the Berlin Wall fell…

A day or a week after whatever the last horrific headline was …

…it’s hard to be hopeful. Hard to know, sometimes, what my hope is based on.

But I still hope. I don’t always know why, or in what. But the hope I hold to is the only way I know of not breaking faith with those who sleep: in Flanders Fields, and in cold graves at the bottom of the ocean, and in Auschwitz, and in Hiroshima, and at Ground Zero, and in Afghanistan, and in every place humans have slaughtered other humans for the past 100 years.

I try to keep faith.

This Nest Feels a Little … Empty

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On Labour Day weekend we dropped our daughter, Emma, off at college in another province. Our eldest, Chris, lives here in town but shares a house with a bunch of friends, so while we still see him lots he hasn’t lived at home in nearly two years.

So we drove back home to a house that, only a few years ago, seemed almost too full. Now it mostly has just Jason and myself, and Gal, our dog.

You might remember that our old dog, Max, who grew up alongside our kids, passed away about a year ago. The decision to get another dog never seemed as smart as the day we drove back home from Nova Scotia and went into the house to find Gal there waiting for us.

All the cliches are true, as it turns out. How it seems like only a breath of time since they were both small, how the hours and days that passed so slowly at the time seem in retrospect to have flown by. How your heart permanently walks around outside your body, only now that heart is split in two and lives in two different places. 

Mostly, being an empty-nester is what I expected. I knew I would miss having the kids in the house: their presence, their conversation, their sense of humour. I especially miss the Emma of last year when she was a high-school senior, basically grown up and not needing a lot in the way of parenting, just hanging out with me and her dad like another adult in the house.

The things I don’t miss, the things I actually like about this stage of life, are also pretty much what I expected. I’ve never been the kind of mom whose whole identity was tied up in being a mom and “needed to be needed.” If anything, I’m a basically selfish person who loved my actual kids a lot but often found it hard to spend two decades with my life organized around the needs of other people. When the kids were younger I often had that “But when do I get time for meeeeee?” whine in my head. Now I have that time and yes, I do enjoy being able to plan and do things without having to take as many different people’s needs into account. I enjoy the time Jason and I get to spend together as a couple of adults.

One aspect of empty-nesting that I was completely prepared for, based on watching my own parents (especially my mom) was that even when the day-to-day care and feeding is done, the involvement and the worry never is. I hope I don’t take this to the level my mom did — when I was forty she was still perfectly capable of looking at me going out of the house and saying, “Is that all you’ve got on? It’s cold out, put on a hat!” But with an eighteen-year-old college student across the water and a twenty-year-old aspiring musician across town, I never feel entirely free from worry. I think about them and worry about their struggles approximately 120% of the time … and do what I can to help, but that’s very little compared to the days when I could put bandaids on their skinned knees and make it all better.

 

Tourist of the Past

I’ve been in England for almost three weeks. I’m heading home tomorrow. Jason was with me for the first 10 days, while we were tourists in London, and since then I’ve been on my own in Bristol, exploring the city where the first seven chapters of my work-in-progress A Roll of the Bones is set.

Problem is, the book is set there in 1610, and I could only visit in 2018.

I would, of course, love actual time travel if it came with a guaranteed return ticket (no way am I getting permanently stuck in a world without flush toilets, hot showers, or chocolate bars). But until that technology exits, the struggle for the writer of historical fiction remains: you can never really visit the places your stories are set, because those places exist only in the past.

If it’s the recent past (as with several of my Newfoundland historical novels) you can at least talk to people who lived at that time, look at old photographs, listen to stories. But going farther back — say, to the early 17th century, as I’m doing with A Roll of the Bones — there’s no-one left alive who remembers it, and no photographs. Some descriptions in very, very old texts. A few maps. But no way to get back there.

So all the while I’ve been researching this book, especially while in England, I’ve been poking at the edges of the past. That might mean spending time in recreated 16th and 17th century kitchens, whether that’s the kitchen of a palace …

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 … or of a labourer’s cottage:

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It’s also meant watching modern stonemasons at work on repairs to a cathedral, using tools very similar to those that would have been used 400 years ago:

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And it’s meant standing on the deck of a replica ship, imagining how it would have felt with the sails unfurled, pulling away from Bristol’s docks down the Avon river to the sea and then across the ocean to an unimaginable new world:

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Fortunately, there are many places dotted around England (and Wales, where I visited the wonderful National Museum at St. Fagan’s) where you can explore little bits and pieces of the past. And Bristol itself, while very much a twenty-first century, still retains some of the cobbled streets, old buildings, and other bits and pieces that allow you to step through a gate into — not the past, exactly, but a place where you can briefly imagine you’re there.

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Matthew 2:14-18, Alternate Text (A Lost & Disputed Fragment)

So [Joseph] got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt. But behold, at the border they were met by Roman soldiers, who challenged them, saying, “Why are you coming into Egypt? Are you not from Judea?”

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“We are fleeing to save the life of our child,” said Joseph, “for He was born in Bethlehem, and Herod decreed that all the boys in Bethlehem and vicinity under two years old are to be killed, so we were greatly afraid, and an angel of the Lord told us to flee to a land of safety.”

“This is indeed a land of safety,” said the soldier, “but only for us Romans, and to some extent for our Egyptian subjects. Herod has reason to fear you Judeans, for your land is a hotbed of rebels and terrorists. Our governor, Gaius Tyrannus, has decreed that he will not allow Egypt to be infested with illegal Judeans. You must return to your own country.”

“You would have us return to a land where our son’s life is in danger? The king seeks to have Him killed!”

“King Herod upholds the Pax Romana, as does governor Gaius Tyrannus,” declared the soldier. “If you persist in crossing into Egyptian territory, you will both be imprisoned.”

Then Mary cried aloud, and said, “Have mercy on us! I am the handmaiden of the Lord, and He has given us this child to bring down the rulers from their thrones, and cast down the mighty!”

And Joseph tried to quiet her, and was sore afraid, for he knew that rulers did not like that kind of talk.

“Now I know you are rebels!” said the soldier, “For the crime of illegally entering the Roman province of Egypt, you and your husband will be thrown in prison.”

“I cannot take my child to prison!” cried Mary.

“Of course not,” said the soldier. “Your child will be taken into our custody, and when your sentence is complete, He will be returned to you. If we can find Him, and if He is able to tell us His parents’ names.”

“He is but a babe!” cried Mary, as the soldier took Jesus from her arms. “He is still nursing at the breast! Please, have mercy!!”

But the soldier hardened his heart, though he had babes of his own at home and it tore his soul to hear the cries of the infant Jesus. He remembered the degree of Gaius Tyrannus, and the mighty power of Caesar Augustus far away in Rome. And he took the child away to a detention facility that was almost definitely not a cage, while the other soldiers led Mary and Joseph away.

And the cries of the infant Jesus mingled with the cries of Mary His mother in the Egyptian night, so that it might be fulfilled as the prophet had spoken:.

“A voice is heard in Ramah,

    weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children

    and refusing to be comforted,

    because they are no more.” 

(Artwork: Flight into Egypt, Gentile da Fabriano, 1370-1427)

Three Things That Made Me Cry

I don’t know what got me thinking about this the other day, but I was remembering all the times I watched the movie Cars when my kids were little, and how they found it reliably hilarious that I would always cry at the musical montage above. Of course Songs (and other triggers, but mostly songs) That Made Mom Cry were a constant source of amusement for my kids; I’m an easy cryer and all kinds of things set me off.

But in the case of this song and video clip from Cars, there’s a very specific cry-trigger: the idea of small towns that were once busy and bustling but got abandoned along the way in the rush to modern life. And when I think of that, then it reminds me of other, similar things that have brought a tear to my eye. One of them, in fact, may have been where this whole train of thought started.

I was recently reading a book (Jamie Fitzpatrick’s excellent The End of Music) about the heyday of the Gander International Airport. Gander is better known to most people nowadays because of the stranded 9/11 passengers and their hosts, memorialized in the Broadway musical Come From Away. But long before that, Gander was a hub of international air travel, back when transatlantic flights had to stop to refuel.

A couple of summers ago I had occasion to fly out of Gander airport, catching a flight to Halifax during a very foggy July when it seemed like nearly ever flight out of here was grounded due to fog. When I got to Gander and went through security, the single security officer there said, “You’m goin’ to Halifax or Goose?”

On top of the frazzled, stressed day I was having — driving all the way from St. John’s to Gander and still not being sure my flight would get into Halifax on time — her question nearly brought me to tears. There were only two flights going out of Gander that afternoon — my flight to Halifax, and another to Goose Bay. This, for a place that was once the airline hub of the Western world. Definitely a “Main Street isn’t Main Street anymore” moment.

That reminded me of yet another moment … several years ago, when on a Sunday morning some friends and I decided to go take in the morning service at a little Salvation Army corps around the bay. Like most small-town churches of almost any denomination, it was sparsely attended and mostly by older people. In announcements before the service, one of the officers was bringing the congregation up to date on what had happened to a large donation they had received for buying band instruments. Because the church had no band members left, they had donated some to another corps in a larger centre that had more young people and a functioning band; they used the rest to buy a “Promoted to Glory” flag. That’s the flag they drape over coffins at a Salvation Army funeral. Money that had been donated for a thriving band of mostly-young Salvationists was being used instead for a flag to drape over coffins, because that’s who was left in town — the elderly and the dying.

I don’t know why the decline of small towns pulls at my heart so much. I’m an urban person. I live in the largest urban area (which is still smallish, about 150,000 people) in my province. If I moved to Ontario I’d want to live in downtown Toronto. I like cities. I’d go stir-crazy in a small town. 

Yet the thought of small towns dying, of the people who lived there moving away and these vibrant little places being left behind and emptied of life and energy, for some reason, always makes me cry.

I don’t want to live in a small town. I guess I just want them to be there.

Six Possible Things Before Friday: A Thank-You Note to Feminism

Another day, another argument with a conservative friend on social media. The recurring themes of 2017 — outrage and polarization — continue into 2018, and hopefully most of us have learned to pick our battles so we don’t self-immolate on a pyre of righteous indignation. Because you certainly could; there’s more than enough out there to be indignant about.

But there’s one battle I will always fight, and that’s anytime a woman says “I’m not a feminist; I don’t want to be considered a feminist; I don’t respect the feminist movement.” Mind you, if women say that in a private conversation, in their own homes, that’s fine. But if they say it anywhere in a public space, if their words are uttered aloud in public or published in paper or online, then yeah, I’m gonna tangle with them. Because they are standing on a platform that generations of feminists fought for them to have, and using that very platform to deride the movement that made it possible for them to be there.

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I’ll try to get a couple of caveats out of the way as quickly as possible: Yes, you can live your life however you want. If you want to reject feminism and live the life of a typical woman in an earlier century — focused on home life, submissive to your husband or father, choosing not to pursue higher education or work outside the home — you certainly have every right to make that choice. Your actions are consistent with your beliefs.

For that matter, if you are a feminist and you want to make home and family your main focus, that’s cool too. I chose to quit work for seven years to stay home with my kids when they were small; I believe feminism is about creating a world where every woman can make the choices that are best for her (and her family if she has one). My issue is specifically with women who enjoy the advantages of feminism while distancing themselves from the movement, or outright repudiating it.

Also, I don’t have to agree with every statement every feminist on the planet has ever made in order to call myself a feminist. Feminists can and do disagree with each other. As with any “ism,” there are real and important debates within feminism. But the fact that I might disagree with other feminists about how to achieve the goal of equality for every woman (which is what feminism is; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) does not mean I am not a feminist, anymore than my intense disagreement with Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell Jr makes me not a Christian.

Feminism is about equality, plain and simple. If you say “I don’t believe in feminism; I believe men and women should be equal,” you’re talking gibberish. To continue the analogy from my last paragraph, it’s like saying, “I don’t believe in Christianity; I just believe that Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of the World.” Oooo…kayyyy, you can make up your own names for things if you want, but you’ve just described the exact thing you claim not to believe in.

So, why am I so proud to be a feminist, and why will I always go to battle with any woman who enjoys equal rights but claims not to be a feminist? Because I’m grateful for feminism. I’m grateful for the things it allows me to do. Here are just a few of them — things I’ve been able to do this week, Jan. 28 – Feb. 3, 2018, here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, because of feminism:

1. I went to work. At my job (teaching at an adult-education centre), I’m one of the better paid instructors. Why? Because I have two master’s degrees (one in Education and one in my teachable area, English), and over 20 years of experience. At various times in the past:

women had to leave the teaching profession after they married
a man could be paid more than a woman for doing the same job regardless of qualifications, just because “Well, he’s a man and has a family to support.”
women were not allowed to pursue higher education.

Without feminists, I wouldn’t have gotten my university degrees, or been allowed to continue in my job, or been paid based on my experience and qualifications rather than my gender. I’m grateful for trailblazers like Grace Annie Lockhart, who in 1875 because the first woman in the British Empire to earn a bachelor’s degree (and to Mount Allison University in New Brunswick for giving it to her). I’m grateful to everyone who ever fought for pay equity legislation and anti-discrimination laws that make it illegal to pay a woman less than a man for doing the same job.

2. I went home. Specifically, I went home to a husband who sees me as his equal in every way. Who doesn’t compare how much money we make or who’s more successful in their career or see our relationship as a competition in any way. Who pitches in and does his share to maintain the home we both live in; who was an equal partner in raising our children.

My dad was this kind of husband, too.  He was a hands-on dad who did everything with me and did his share of work around the house. But that kind of egalitarian marriage was unusual in the 1960s and 70s when I grew up. Although my parents joked about the fact that Dad did most of the cooking (“Neither of us knew how to cook when we got married, and I got hungry first” was his reasoning), I, like most kids, thought my family was normal. Only as an adult did I find out how many of my peers had been raised by dads who had never changed a diaper or cooked a meal.

If people prefer a “traditional” marriage where paid work and mowing the lawn is the husband’s role and housework and childcare falls to the wife, that’s their choice. But many of us — growing numbers, among young people — prefer marriages where we at least strive for an equitable division of labor, a partnership between two people who see each other as equals. Thanks to feminism, families like mine are no longer considered odd or exceptional. 

3. I spent some time with each of my two young adult children. Why is this significant? Because two was the exact number of children I wanted to have. Nothing wrong with having one or none or five either, but two children were what my husband and I wanted, and thanks to legal and available birth control, that’s what we got. Thank-you to birth control pioneers like Margaret Sanger and many other feminists who made it possible to choose how many kids, if any, a woman wants to have.

Marriage and family have worked out pretty well for me. They don’t work out so well for everyone, a point that was brought home to me this week when …

4. I spent some time chatting to a friend whose marriage is ending. Feminists often get blamed for divorce but the fact is that unhappy marriages long predate the feminist movement and are just as likely to happen to people with conservative, traditional views of marriage as to feminists. Throughout history, there have always been marriages that just didn’t work out. But in earlier times, people often stayed in unhappy, even abusive, marriages, because divorce was difficult to obtain and the economic cost for women was too high to consider leaving. Now, women like my friend whose marriage fails have choices. They can:

end the marriage on the same grounds their husband can use
share custody of their children after the divorce
have a share of the property they jointly owned with their husbands

Thanks to feminists for fighting for those rights!

In between my day job and my family life, this week …

5. I spoke at a public event about a book I wrote. Women have, of course, been writing books for a long time, and there has never been a law that I know of prohibiting them from doing so. But for a long time books by “lady novelists” were treated as a rarity, a curiosity, something not to be taken as seriously as books by men. When novelists as great and influential as Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte had to publish their books under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in hopes that those masculine-sounding names would earn their books some respect, writing by women was not treated as a serious endeavour. (Some would argue that women’s writing still gets less respect, which is an interesting and important debate, but nobody doubts that we’ve come a long way).

And as for speaking in public — well, that hasn’t always been a given either. Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” That was in the 1700s. In 1909, here in my hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, a debating society held a public debate on whether or not women should have the right to vote. The debaters, pro and con, were all men. Women were not even allowed to attend. Some uppity feminists went off and started their own club — the Ladies’ Reading Room — so they could have a forum in which to publicly discuss issues of the day. These same women went on to demand the right to vote — imagine! Which brings me to the last thing I did this week that I owe to feminists …

6. I expressed opinions about political issues. As with speaking and writing, women have rarely been legally banned from holding opinions — though there was a time when politicians campaigned to women in the hopes that they would influence their husbands’ votes, having no vote of their own. I didn’t vote this week, but I would have if an election happened to fall during the week. In between elections, I can hold and express opinions knowing that I get to do more than just have those opinions: I have a voice and a vote in our democracy.

Those are just six things that are possible for me, this week and every week, because of the feminists of the past; six reasons I am proud to call myself a feminist. And hey, the week’s not even over yet!

So if you are a woman who, this week, has worked at a job, perhaps one you went to college to prepare for, and got paid based on your qualifications not your ovaries: feminists did that for you. If you are married to a man who treats you as an equal: feminists created a world where a marriage like yours is normal, not an oddity. If you’ve chosen to plan your family or not to have kids at all right now with the help of birth control: feminists got that for you. If you would like the ability to have access to your children and not be penniless should that husband leave you: thank feminists for the laws that made that possible. If you published an article, wrote a blog, taught a workshop, delivered a speech, or otherwise aired your views in public: feminists cleared the way for you. And if you have an opinion about who should be running your country and how they should do it: thank feminists that you not only have the right to hold that opinion, but to do something about it by voting and maybe even running for office yourself.

If all that is true and you still don’t want to call yourself a feminist because some right-wing propaganda machine has fed you their own made-up definition of what “feminism” is — well, that’s your right. Call yourself whatever you want; make up a word if you want to. But if you stand on that platform that generations of women built and use that space to say, “I hate feminists!”, don’t expect me to shut my mouth.

What? No Christmas Post This Year!

In past years I have gotten pretty creative, even philosophical, about Christmas. This year … well now. No post for the entire month of December. You know what I did in December? I released a new book, and our family adopted a new dog. If you follow this blog you know our beloved old dog Max passed away at the end of October, and I had a dog-shaped void in my heart. Just before Christmas, Gal came along, a one-year-old husky-mix shelter dog from Labrador, and she has done a wonderful job filling that void.

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With all that going on — well, we did have Christmas, in that we had presents and a tree and Christmas dinner, but a lot of things, like Christmas cards and letters, fell by the wayside. New book and new dog just a couple of weeks before Christmas kept us pretty busy, but those were both good things, and honestly, the planet keeps on spinning even if I don’t write a clever, creative Christmas blog post or send out a Christmas letter.

So, life rolls in into 2018 for our family. Jason and I are now the parents of two young adults, practically. Emma will graduate from high school in 2018 and, according to her current plan, move to Nova Scotia for university. Chris is still here in town, but living with friends, hoping for his big break in the music industry. We are loving them the best we can but recognizing that most of our work here is done. 

2018 will be the next step in this gradual shift towards being a couple with grown-up kids instead of a family of four living at home. Seems appropriate that we have a new dog (and some new hobbies like snowshoeing, which Gal, Labrador snowdog that she is, enjoys doing with us!) as we move into new phases of our lives. 

Whatever phase of your life you’re in now … may 2018 bring you blessings.

I’ll be back with more blog posts in the new year now that things have settled down a little!

To Wit: To Woo (Part Two)

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Last week I wrote about wooing – that process where you fall in love with someone who isn’t exactly repelled by you, doesn’t give you a definite “No,” but also doesn’t see the same future in the relationship you do – and you convince them, by your patient and faithful devotion, to fall in love with you too. It’s a process that has a long an honourable history in literature, folklore, mythology and pop culture.

But it’s also a process that has become somewhat suspect and tarnished by the fact that, so often, men have used “wooing” as an excuse to cover everything from stalking, to refusing to let a woman leave a relationship, right up to rape and murder (for the man who believes that if he can’t have her, no-one else should). 

I said in that last post that I was wooed and won, when I was young, and I still believe there’s a place, within a relationship of mutual respect where you truly view the other person as a person, for a little wooing. A little courtship. A little “winning her heart.” Not every guy who sets out to get the girl is, in my view, a boor who can’t take no for an answer. My husband certainly wasn’t. 

But what about the flip side – the woman who falls in love with a man who’s not as interested? Unrequited love can strike people of any gender (and of course I’m talking here within the paradigm of heterosexual relationships, but there’s lots of unrequited love going around in same-sex relationships too).

For most of my young life, during my high school and college years, I was the victim of a series of unrequited crushes, one-sided love affairs that the guys involved were probably completely unaware of. I was that “just one of the guys” girl, firmly friend-zoned long before that term was popularized.

Years later, when I was raising my own daughter and she played the Taylor Swift song “You Belong With Me” for me, I recognized the voice Taylor was channeling instantly. I was that girl – the happy-go-lucky, easygoing “just a friend” girl who passionately hoped that guy after guy would recognize he was REALLY meant to be with me, instead of with his popular, pretty girlfriend.

(PS — whatever you think of Taylor’s music and what she’s done with her career since those days, I still think this is just the cutest video. Despite the difficulty of making young Taylor look like a nerdy geek girl, this is still the nerdy geek girl’s fantasy for many young women. Certainly it was mine in high school).

Mythology and literature have glorified the man who pursues the woman of his dreams – whether he is in fact the perfect courtly knight, or just an ass who won’t take no for an answer. Mythology and literature have not been similar kind to girls like I was, or girls like Taylor sings about in that song (I somehow doubt Taylor herself was ever one of those girls, though you never know). 

Men who pursue women are either romantic or dangerous; sometimes, sadly , there’s a fine line between the two. Though anyone can fall victim to an unrequited passion, the power dynamics are not the same. Even if you could somehow leave out, or get over, centuries of cultural conditioning telling (some) men that they can take whatever (whoever) they want (“when you’re rich and famous they let you do it”) … even without that cultural conditioning, the simply physical mechanics of male and female bodies mean that it’s much likely that a man will be able to force himself sexually on a woman who doesn’t want him, and/or to “punish” her with physical violence for rejecting his advances.

As a woman, if you’re pursued by a guy you secretly kinda like; it’s flattering. If you’re pursued by a guy you really don’t like, who won’t leave you alone, it quickly progresses from being pathetic, to being annoying, to being scary. I’ve seen it happen, with a friend in college whose unwanted date turned into a stalker. He was small and physically un-imposing; her friends treated it like a bit of a sad joke when she clearly told him “I don’t love you, I never have loved you, and I never will love you” and he kept hanging around. But then he kept hanging around, and we all slowly dawned to the realization that she had had much earlier: even a small, un-scary guy becomes scary when he won’t take no for an answer. (Fortunately in that case the stalking ended without violence, but largely because she graduated and moved away from the area). 

Because women are far less likely to be physically threatening to men, the unwanted female suitor is usually not perceived as scary: rather, we’re left back at pathetic or annoying. While there are numerous cultural tropes of the knight who wins the fair (and initially reluctant) maiden, female wooers have far fewer role models, and their stories don’t end as well. 

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena is in love with Demetrius. He used to be in love with her, but he transferred his affections to Hermia. We don’t know why; as Hermia’s father is pushing for the match, there may have been economic considerations involved. But Helena assumes it’s because she’s ugly and her friend Hermia is beautiful. She pursues Demetrius shamelessly, suggests that she will follow him around like a dog and be willing to be beaten like a dog as long as she can be near him, insists that his contempt only makes her love him more. Even the watching fairies take pity on her as she utters the lines that sum up the plight of the woman caught in unrequited love: 

“We cannot fight for love, as men can do

We should be wooed, and were not made to woo.” 

Helena’s wooing is fruitless, but a dose of fairy love-potion sets things right. Demetrius falls in love with her again, and he’s the one character the fairies leave dosed at the end of the play rather than resetting him to “Normal” with the love-potion antidote. Helena gets her happily-ever-after, but only because the man she loves is drugged into returning her love. 

Victor Hugo sketched the classic friend-zoned woman in Les Miserables, though it took the musical and lyrical genius of Alain Boulbil and Claude-Michel Schonberg to bring Eponine’s character gloriously and sadly to life in the musical. She adores Marius, but because Eponine is both dirt-poor and not particularly attractive, he ignores her in favour of the beautiful (and middle-class) Cosette.

Blithely unaware of Eponine’s devotion, Marius takes advantage of her friendship to have her run across a battle scene to bring a message to his beloved. This gives Eponine the opportunity to belt out her show-stopper, “On My Own,” in which she gives voice to “just friends” everywhere. Then she makes it back to the barricades in time to die in Marius’s arms.

Death seems to be the best possible fate, literarily speaking, for a woman in love with a man who rejects her (if you can’t arrange for fairies to dope him up for you). Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid sits forlornly in Copenhagen harbour as a reminder to women everywhere that if you fall in love with an unattainable prince, you’d better be prepared to lose your voice, walk on feet that feel like they’re being stabbed by knives, be banished from your underwater home, and eventually lose your life – and still not get the guy. Disney gives the Little Mermaid a happy ending, but the original story is the more haunting one, and truer to the experience of any woman who’s been willing to give up every shred of her identity and selfhood for a dude who never recognizes her value. 

Fast-forward to late twentieth-century pop culture, past the feminist movement, and you might imagine things have gotten a bit better for women who fall in unrequited love. The 90s sitcom Friends is remembered both fondly and … un-fondly …  for one relationship: the ten-year-long agonizing will-they-or-won’t they of Ross and Rachel, who were each at various times in unrequited love, pursued each other, rejected each other, got married and divorced and had a baby together before finally putting each other and the audience out of their misery in the final episode. But the most telling unrequited love story of Friends’s seemingly endless run wasn’t Ross and Rachel: it was Janice and Chandler. 

Janice was originally only one of Chandler’s many unsuccessful relationships. Like Jerry Seinfeld’s dates in his similarly endless 90s sitcom, the women Chandler dated were fodder for jokes about a man who was afraid of commitment and looked for ridiculous flaws in his women as an excuse to bail on them. But Janice’s nasal Bronx accent and her delivery of “Oh. My. Gawd” and “Chandler BING!” were exactly the stuff of  hackneyed sitcom tropes, so Janice kept coming back and back. And since they kept bringing her back, the punchline had to be that she wanted Chandler and he didn’t want her, till eventually the mere mention of her name could evoke a hunted look in Chandler’s eyes and a burst of canned laughter from the soundtrack. 

At least Janice didn’t have to die on a Paris barricade, or turn to sea-form on a Danish beach, for love. Instead, she got to live and be ridiculed by the man she loved, all his Friends, and a viewing audience of millions. All for the audacity of doing what men have always been encouraged to do: pursue the one you want. 

Our cultural tropes have never been kind to women wooers. Can we imagine a different world, and different stories to romanticize it? Can we imagine a world in which men and women are truly equals, both equally allowed to fall in love, to pursue the one they love, and to say no if they don’t want to be pursued? Where both men’s and women’s broken hearts are treated as genuine losses, not punchlines – but where neither poses a threat to the object of their love, either? 

I’d like to live in that world. And I’d like to hear the love stories that world would tell. 

But we’ve got a long way to go. 

 

To Wit: To Woo (Part One)

It’s all getting mixed up in my mind, to tell you the truth: that pathetic guy playing the piano on a sidewalk in England and swearing not to stop until his ex took him back, along with scuzzy old Harvey Weinstein and hundreds of other scuzzy old (and young) guys who think that just because they want a woman, they’re somehow going to get her in the end, even if she says, clearly: No. This is not what I want.

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Good Dog

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When our kids, Chris and Emma, were five and three years old, my father in law, who could most charitably described as a little eccentric, showed up our house one fall afternoon with a puppy on a leash. A friend of his had a dog who had had puppies, he said, and they were all going to be put to sleep if they couldn’t find homes for them. He wondered if the kids would like a puppy.

We were going to try out the puppy for a week to see how he blended into our family, to see if Jason and I could cope with a puppy on top of two small kids.

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We had a five-year-old and a three-year-old. HOW DO YOU THINK THIS STORY ENDED?

We got Max nearly by accident; we didn’t even get to pick his name. He came pre-loaded with the most common name for a male dog in Newfoundland. We tried him out for a week to see how we could handle dog ownership, and I was never sure we actually DID handle it all that well. Any personality flaws Max ever had, I blamed not on him but on us. He was a good dog; the goodest of good dogs. Except that sometimes he was a bad dog, because the people who were supposed to be training him were also trying to train to small human children, and teaching them to share and not to bite people seemed more important than training a puppy not to jump up on visitors.

Max’s enthusiasm for greeting people, and knocking drinks out of their hands or taking sandwiches off their plates, meant that sometimes he had to stay in his kennel when we had visitors over. He could not have been a better dog; he could have been better trained, for which I entirely blame his human owners, who were so distracted with their own litter of young.

The three pups in our litter, Chris and Emma and Max, grew up together, taking long family rambles where Chris and Emma were carefully trained by Max to throw tennis balls repeatedly so that he could run after them and bring them back. At the cabin in summer, Max’s happiest place, we could throw tennis balls into the water and he would happily jump in and swim to retrieve them. Jason taught him to swim by throwing him off the end of the dock, at which point Max discovered he could dog-paddle. Then Max taught Jason to take him for rides in the canoe, by jumping into the canoe and waiting for someone to get in and paddle him around.

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Of the four of us, Jason wanted a dog least. Jason is not a dog person, which is no doubt attributable to that time his uncle’s Doberman bit him ON THE EYE when he was 12. But he knew how much the kids and I wanted a dog, especially this dog. Over the years, Jason developed a growing affection for Max in spite of Max being a dog. Max, for his part, returned this affection with a white-hot devotion that never wavered. He loved Jason like an eighth-grade girl loves the captain of the high school football team, following his every move with devoted eyes, literally dogging his steps, basking in the slightest sign of affection. If Jason tried to cross the room and Max threw himself in front of his feet so that Jason said, “Get outta the way, you foolish old thing!” in accents of affectionate frustration, Max’s tail would wag and his eyes shine with joy. You could practically hear him thinking: “Master spoke to me!! Master loves me!!”

I told Emma when she was about fifteen, “Don’t settle for just any man in your life. Wait for someone who looks at you like the dog looks at your father.”

We were busy, while our kids and Max were all growing up. Sometimes I felt like were terrible dog owners, because he was home alone while were at school or work, though that never dimmed his joy at seeing any one of us come through the door. And sometimes we were too busy to take him for walks, and I would feel guilty if he didn’t get out for a walk.

Once I had a student, a young man who had dropped out of school multiple times and had been a drug addict and been in trouble with the law. I would see this boy walk his dog past my house every single day, and I would think, in the eyes of human society I’m a fine upstanding citizen, and this boy is a loser. But if our dogs compared notes, I’d be the loser, and this kid would be the finest person in St. John’s, because his dog never goes a day without a walk.

What Max’s walks sometimes lacked in frequency, they made up for in mileage. Apart from our family walks which focused largely on finding an off-leash place where we could throw the ball for him, or strolls with me and Jason around our centre-city neighbourhood, I would also take Max along on my long solitary rambles. When I decided in 2012 to walk the entire network of Grand Concourse trails around the city, Max was my constant companion. We walked together for hours and he never slowed down or got tired, until of course he did.

Last summer we took him to the vet because he was coughing a lot, and we found out he had a small, slow-growing tumour in his lungs. He was 13 then, already old for a dog of his size. The afternoon after the vet called with his X-ray results, I took Max up Signal Hill, down the Cuckold’s Cove trail and around by Quidi Vidi. We were out for two hours in the hot sun and he trotted along gamely beside me as he always had, stopping to drink water from the ponds we passed. A few weeks later I walked him around one of the big trail loops near our home, and about forty minutes into the walk he lay down on someone’s lawn and when I tried to urge him to go again, he looked up at me as if I were crazy. “You can’t be serious,” his big brown eyes said. “What do you think I am – a puppy?”

We made it home that night, slowly, and after that our long rambles turned to short walks around the neighbourhood. Even a week ago, when we could barely make it around the block, he still looked happy when he saw the leash. He was coughing more by then, and eating less, and I was driven crazy trying to find things to tempt his appetite. He was a dog who had always lived happily on dry dog food because we were those kind of dog owners – don’t be foolish over him, don’t make a fuss, give him the Purina Dog Chow and when he’s hungry enough he’ll eat it. That method worked well for fourteen years, and then in the last two months we progressed through dry dog food, to canned dog food, to fried-up ground beef and sausages and turkey bacon and whatever else we could get him to eat. I hard-boiled eggs and fed them to him from my fingers. The last thing I got him to eat was the chicken patty from a Wendy’s homestyle chicken sandwich.

And then the day came when I knew he was in pain and we couldn’t put it off any longer. We wanted to wait, because Jason, the person he adored most in the world, was away for three weeks on business. Jason is also the person I adore most in the world, as it happens, and it seemed like it would be good for both me and Max to have Jason with us on this last journey together. But we couldn’t wait till Jason came home – it would have been cruel. Our two grown-up pups, Chris and Emma, both said their goodbyes to Max at home. Neither of them could bear the thought of being with him at the end, and I didn’t blame them for that. At seventeen or nineteen, I probably couldn’t have handled that hard farewell either. Chris, who has moved out, dropped over the other night and I told him to be sure to say a good goodbye to his dog because the end was coming soon. Emma was home with me on the afternoon before I took Max to the vet. We sat together and petted him and cried.

My best friend Sherry, who is also a dog owner and dog lover and has been down this road herself, came with me and Max to the vet’s office. It’s the kindest thing a friend has ever done for me: when I texted her in the morning and said I would have to take Max to be put to sleep and I hated to do it alone, she offered at once. She also baked me a lasagna. I pointed out that you don’t really need to make casseroles for pet deaths, because it’s not like Max would have cooked supper for me if he’d been alive. She said, “At least you don’t need to worry about what to make for supper tonight.”

Sherry came into the office with me and we both cried like babies while I petted and soothed Max as the vet gave him the final injection. We watched and stroked his fur as his body, so rarely still for most of his long, lively life, grew quiet. We hugged each other and cried and cried. As we bawled our way back out through the waiting room a woman touched our hands and said, “I’m so sorry. I’ve been there, with my dog.” Everyone else in the waiting room, especially the young couples with puppies, looked at us with eyes as big and sad as their dogs’ eyes. If they hadn’t been through it yet, they knew they would someday. It’s the only bad day in owning a dog.

I went home and told Emma how it had gone. We ate Sherry’s lasagna. I texted Chris and Jason. I phoned my dad. I told them all that it was over and that it had been peaceful. I  moved Max’s kennel and dish from the back porch outside onto the deck because I couldn’t stand to look at them. Then I couldn’t stand to look at the empty space where they’d been.

I followed all the local animal shelters on Facebook to see if they had any dogs to adopt, not because I could ever replace Max but because I don’t think I can live without having a dog. Jason, who still thinks he is not a dog person, has accepted this fact, I think.

I love it that both on Facebook and in real life, every person I know who has a pet understands that this is a real loss. They offer sympathy and empathy and hugs and maybe even lasagna, because this grief is not the same as the grief you feel for a person, but it is real and it hurts. Max came into our lives by accident and I cannot imagine the last fourteen years having been lived without him. He is gone, and he is with us forever.