Since the election, I have seen too many people writing
about how “disappointed” they are with Hillary Rodham Clinton: how she ran her
campaign, how she didn’t win over the media, how she is spending her time and
money now. They (mostly, sadly, women)
want her to be at the front of the crusade to stop Trump and protect us from
tyranny. Or at least, as one woman wrote, donate her money to charities who
will do this. My response to these comments
has been rage. Hillary Clinton has done
more than any other woman to forward both women’s rights and children’s rights. She has ensured healthcare for thousands of
First Responders and children. She spent
over 30 years in public service, and another 15 or 20 behind the scenes
fighting. She has put up with more
misogyny and brutal hatred than anyone else.
She has had her marital problems made into a criminal process. She has been criticized for not taking her
husband’s last name and wearing glasses.
She has been criticized for her bad haircuts and for spending too much
on a haircut. She has been criticized
and called a bitch for trying to get universal healthcare for all Americans. She has been criticized for not having a
chocolate chip cookie recipe. She has
been the victim of so much name calling and disrespect that it is pointless to
enumerate it all. My point is that in
the public forum this woman’s grace, strength and high intelligence have rarely
been discussed, but her pantsuits are, and still she used her gifts for
others. She is a smart and successful
woman who has been held up to impossibly high standards for most of her
life. I can relate.
I am not financially successful, like HRC, but I love my
job and I am good at it. I have a full,
mostly happy, life and that makes me successful, I think. And I am smart. But still, I have spent the
bulk of my life trying to live up to impossibly high standards set for me by my
parents, my ex-husband, my bosses, and Society at large. Growing up, I struggled to connect to my
father, who was a highly intelligent, emotionally distant man. School was the most important thing in his
life, it seemed, since he was a professor, and so I excelled at school. By 2nd grade I was reading at a 5th
grade level. In 5th grade, I
began my first novel, and then my second, to be like my dad, a writer. In 6th
grade, my team won the Math Olympics at my middle school. In 7th and 8th grade,
my stories were published in the school newspaper. In high school I tested into GATE (which wasn’t
even called GATE, but Mentally Gifted Minors [MGM] that first year of its
existence). As an undergraduate, I made
the Dean’s List almost every semester. When
I graduated with a BS in Psychology, no one in my family commented. But when I was pregnant with my first son and
told my father I was going to stay home to raise the baby, he exploded in rage
at the waste of my degree. In my master’s
program, I had 2 short stories published and graduated with distinction. And for all my trouble, I got very little
recognition from my father, or anyone else in my family. I had only done what was expected.
My mother held me to different standards. Like my father, she expected my siblings and
I to behave like proper adults when we were in public or at people’s houses,
even when we were very young. She
insisted on proper table etiquette and bemoaned the way I sat and crossed my
legs. She expected me to be the best at
everything. I was the Most Beautiful, I
was Perfect, I was the Most Talented.
And if I wasn’t the best, she didn’t comment at all or she criticized. As with my father, any achievement I made in
my life was either ignored or given momentary attention and then forgotten. It is harder to put into words the standards
my mother held me to, but I would imagine most women my age can relate. I was supposed to be exactly like she wanted
me to be. I was supposed to make up for
all her failings and her mistakes by not having any of my own. And most difficult of all, I was expected to
respond to her in such a way as to never hurt her feelings, never go against
her, give her all the attention and control she wanted over me and my
children. I was never enough. I didn’t visit enough. I didn’t let her see my children enough. I didn’t call enough. I didn’t listen to her enough. I didn’t work hard enough. When I was living with her, I didn’t clean
the house enough, or correctly. When I
was living on my own, I didn’t even organize my own cupboards well enough and
she had to reorganize them on one of her first visits. I didn’t stand up straight enough. I was not graceful enough. I did not acquiesce enough to her will. I did not praise her enough or meet her needs
well enough. And on and on.
I was a new wife and mother in the mid-80s. This meant that there was no way I was going
to live up to anyone’s standards. As a
stay-home mom, I didn’t work hard enough.
My ex-husband, on more than one occasion, would come home from a long
day at work to a clean house, his laundry washed and put away, the cupboards
full, his children bathed, driven to various places, entertained, taught, ALIVE
and without injury, and he would ask, “What did you do all day?” And he was more
understanding than most at that time.
Being up all night with sick children did not mean I got to sleep all
day. Weekends were not my time off. I loved being home with my babies and being
there for my school-aged children when they needed me, but it was hard. Society told me, along with my ex, that I
wasn’t earning my keep. Society also
told me that as a stay-home mom I was not a success. I was wasted.
When I went back to school and then to work, that same Society tried to
shame me for not being home with my children enough. I could not win that one.
I could go on and on, lamenting about the expectations my
work has of me to volunteer hundreds of hours a semester to teach to their
standards or the friends who expected me to put them ahead of my children (wtf?),
but none of it is as bad as the standards I held myself to. Even as I typed that sentence, I told myself
not to end it with a preposition, but I did, in defiance. Probably before I was even able to think for
myself, I was finding ways to push myself to be what I thought everyone wanted
me to be. It isn’t so much in outward
achievements that I push myself. For
example, I love learning and school was never a burden. The clean house with 3 kids, yes. That one was.
But more so, I held myself up to impossible standards internally. Much like HRC, it seemed I did not smile
enough and so I learned to force a smile.
I was too serious and thought too analytically, and it made people
uncomfortable, and so I tried to stop. I
am an introvert in an extrovert’s world and so I pushed myself to be
outgoing. I am a person who needs a lot
of time for rest and contemplation, but that did not fit with the busy schedule
I kept. I could not allow myself to be
sick, and rest to heal myself. I felt
shame at my weakness. In fact, I felt
shame for almost everything about myself.
Outwardly, I had it all. On the
inside, I was tired and sad and lonely.
I spent so much energy trying to live up to the crazy standards for
women in our culture, including being thin enough but making my modest bust
seem bigger, that I exhausted myself to the point of a breakdown. And when I sat in the hospital, I thought, as
I breathed a sigh of relief through my depression and anxiety, “No one can
expect anything from me in here.”
Every time I see my mother, who is rapidly slipping into
dementia, she comments on the gap I now have between two of my teeth near the
front of my mouth. “Your perfect smile
is ruined,” is her usual refrain. I did
have perfect, straight, white teeth after 2 years of braces. I was proud of my beautiful smile. But at 53, after decades of clenching my jaw
in my sleep, those teeth have moved a bit and are not so straight nor so white
anymore. But, quite honestly, I am okay
with that. Steve tells me I have a
beautiful smile all the time. And, more
importantly, I have a genuine smile now.
I am learning to set realistic standards for myself in many areas of my
life, and I am working on not paying attention to other people’s expectations
of me. It is not easy and it does not
make me popular all the time, but it is gratifying.
So, I can relate to Hillary Rodham Clinton and the
impossible standards she has been held up to (there is that preposition at the
end of a sentence again). And I admire
and love her more than any other public figure.
She makes me think of another public figure I admire, Martin Luther
King, Jr., who had to face hatred and criticism and did so with such grace, as
has HRC. #imstillwithher
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