The Sacrifice

Humans of New YorkAnd in conclusion, appreciate your mother.

I’ve been trying to write this post for years, and as the evidence accumulates I feel less and less articulate.  Trump’s little gif, manipulated to appear that he had smacked Hillary with a golf ball, emerged around the same time that a pharma exec offered a $5000 bounty for a strand of Hillary’s hair. Contemplating such things, my eyelid twitches and I want to vomit or curl up and go away. But that's what they want, so I'm staying put.

I’ve written about becoming invisible when I crossed the 50-year mark, but then something even weirder started to happen. Young men who couldn’t ignore me started to hate me. An actor I rehearsed with called me controlling and told me to shut up. Another sent an email to say “Fuck you!”  Believe me, I was much nastier as a younger woman but such insults were absent.  

As the young men delivered venom, my teenaged daughter delivered contempt. It was nothing personal, just the way daughters separate nowadays. How else do you distinguish yourself from a disrespected elder? Better to be up than down. While this was happening, I saw other mothers suffering, humiliated, but saying nothing because, after all, we want our daughters to be strong, to stand up for themselves. As is my way, I started conversations with many mothers who had survived the teen years--with nurses as they were drawing my blood, with divorce attorneys as we were discussing terms, and often I would hear:  “I nearly died.”  There were stories of being hospitalized, losing hair, retreating to the comfort of this or that substance, and by the way, this is all often happening while being replaced by younger women either at work or at love or both.  

How do you think that feels?

What are the long term consequences of sacrificing my generation of women? Who benefits?

Fountain of Oldth was a conversation between older and younger women, and we put this dilemma right on the slab. How can older women support younger women when they are being obliterated?  How can younger women truly grow into their strength without models?  

When Hillary C was interviewed for Humans of New York, she told a story about men yelling at her when she was taking a law school entrance exam. Here is a glimpse of the Fountain of Oldth riff.  I haven't figured out how to make a gif yet though I have learned how to pronounce it.

Yes, I did figure it out.  Do you like it this way?

via GIPHY

We have a long way to go, baby.  

October 2017