While I was moving around books in the casita, a 1992 journal fell into my lap. On the cover, it said "Winnie the Pooh Journal"--on top of each page was a quotation from Winnie and friends.
As Mike was inside the house showering, I sat down and read it, cover to cover, struck by how many things I'd reported I no longer remember. But it evoked a sense of that year, much of which I do remember. It was a difficult, sad, weepy year. It made me sad to read it, as I heard the voice of the younger woman who used to be me. It was the year of my 25th wedding anniversary, un-celebrated. It was a roller coaster year and I was plagued with physical aches and pains, emotional fog, and an overriding sense of loneliness.
As Mike and I drove to get our morning coke and donut, I told him about what I'd read--that, at 135 pounds or so, I wrote almost every day about how fat and unattractive I was. My dreams hinted at secrets I wasn't ready to see in my waking hours.
Mike said, "Every girl should be encouraged to keep a journal. It helps to know where you are going when you take a look at where you've been."
Mike has always preferred the friendship of women, and many have told them the secrets of their pasts. He sees a pattern in the lives of women who came of age in the sixties and seventies. "When they get older, they do everything they can to break out of their cages," he said.
Women, he believes, are more programmed than men are--to be pleasers of other people, to put themselves last, and to keep secrets, often secrets about abuse in their childhood homes or marriages. While we girls were preparing ourselves for marriage, young men were more free to be who they were. I don't know many men, so I'm taking his word for it for now.
He was scandalized when I told him that a high school counselor once told me, "You should go to college just long enough to get your MRS degree." Good grades, a high IQ--those he admitted I had. But the real goal was matrimony.
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