Saugus High School students film, star in "The Sports Lounge"

Saugus High School students film, star in "The Sports Lounge"

This Explains A Lot - Moral development, gender roles & religious beliefs from when I was a kid.

My assignment this week is to examine my moral development as well as to look at factors in my childhood that effected how I perceived gender roles and religious beliefs. And the thing that I found most interesting about this reflection is that by looking back upon my history, so many of my ideas on my own sense of morality has developed after what would be considered my childhood, and have occurred almost despite my socialization into my gender and my family’s religious beliefs.

My symbolic inheritance was for all intents and purposes that of the typical Yankee WASP upbringing. By the time I came along to my already full family, my parents had an upper middle class lifestyle. We had two cars and a regular summer vacation in Vermont. As a small independent group, we valued work and school and baseball. In a nod to our Anglo-Saxon ancestors and assumed Protestantry, our custom complex consisted of spending Sundays with our extended family, but outside of my grandmother, they had little to do with our daily existence.

My father was for a time a very successful commercial banker, and my mother was an operating room nurse who had retired as soon as I had come along. She stayed at home with me, but oddly had very little to do with me throughout the day. I can remember from a very young age that we never exactly saw eye to eye on things. I am perhaps a bit critical of her, because I know that she would reach out to me, on occasion. But deep down, I had always felt a disconnect in our relationship – I half-expect that she assumed I would have interests and feelings that would be just like her other three children, and I think she was repeatedly surprised when she found that I wasn’t like them at all. I think I was confounding as a child.

In a burst of enthusiasm, my mom would sometimes exclaim to me that she had a wonderful idea for the two of us to spend some time together one on one, “Let’s play Scrabble!” She thought that I, like her older children, would love to play Scrabble, despite the fact that on many other such occasions I had informed her that I actually hated Scrabble. But in an attempt to capitalize upon her reaching out, I might then suggest, “Let’s go pick blackberries in the woods behind our house, like the Sjobergs did and we could make some jam for your toast!” She liked jam on her toast in the morning, so why did she then look at me quizzically? We usually ended up with me taking her up on her following suggestion that I should go ride my bike or something. We would part ways, both generally disappointed.  

I was exposed to very traditional gender roles in that sense that my mother stayed at home with me, however, I didn’t believe that women couldn’t achieve or go out of the home and work. My father encouraged us that we could do whatever we wanted to do – and my brother and I both took out the trash and shoveled snow. I was fascinated at my grandmother who worked in the Linens Department of TW Rogers in Lynn until she was eighty years old. Although she hadn’t worked outside of the home when her girls were young, raising her five daughters and trying to keep tabs on my grandfather, who was predisposed to quarts of gin and the horse races was I’m sure a full time occupation. When she found herself home alone at fifty years of age, she went out and got herself a job. She retired thirty years later, and legend has it, the administrators thought all along that their loyal employee was rounding out her career at a traditional 65 years of age, and gave her a lovely send-off. She knew this, but never corrected their error.

My grandmother could make things happen. If it were snowing so badly that the buses weren’t running in the city, she could somehow persuade a guy in a firetruck to give her a ride downtown to her work. And upon arrival, when she discovered the store was closed due to the weather, she could then get that same fireman to drop her back where he had found her at the bus stop. She could convince a bus driver that it was silly for him to drive her all the way to South Station in Boston back from Nova Scotia when she could walk the two miles to her daughter’s house from the junction of 128 and Route 1. And she could ease my father’s temper when he discovered that while he had been waiting for three hours to pick her up in Boston to find that she was not on the bus from Canada but was back on Clearview Avenue, ironing his shirts.

Shortly after she had retired from work, my grandmother would ask my father if she could come and live with us.  She moved into a tiny bedroom on the second floor of our house and occupied the rocking chair in the living room for the rest of her days. Ma was our only link to a more collectivist way of life. Our aunts and uncles would visit her and of course see us. But we remained singularly, The Blatchfords - fiercely independent, not requiring any one else’s assistance for anything. At the time, when we were in the black, it seemed like it was the right, the only way, to live. And it was a hard thing for my dad to let go of when things turned sour for us a few years later.

For a good deal of my childhood, I spent Friday or Saturday nights at my grandmother’s apartment a few miles away. I liked being with her, she seemed to like to have me there, but like my mother, she let me alone to do as I liked. Unlike home, I was the only other kid there, and when eventually after running in the yard, picking through her clothes and jumping on her beds, I would come to my grandmother she treated me as though I were special and paid very close attention to my particular likes and dislikes. Ma never mixed me up with another child, despite the fact that she occasionally worked through a stream of names before she got to the right one to call me for dinner. She fed me chocolates from her private stash, made me the waffles I liked in the morning and let me swim in her enormous bathtub.

I never felt as close to my mother as I did to my grandmother. The only time my mom and I really gelled was watching TV. She wanted to rest a lot, I remember. I would come home from school and would suggest to her a game of hide and seek, or ask her if we could please to go to the park and she would say, “Let’s take a rest, you’ve had a busy day.” And we’d end up watching TV. At the time, she, a middle aged mom, was pretty heavy, I never put her unhealthy weight together with her requests to sit all the time. I just thought she was boring. Still, if I wanted to spend time with her, I sat. One of the kids’ networks played Lassie reruns in the afternoon, so we had that. Or we would catch an old I Love Lucy, or Carol Burnett Show when I was home sick. I felt closest to her when I was sick actually, she was a nurse and would spring into action to take care of me. Her disinterest in my interests or urges turned to regular temperature checks, a steady stream of ginger ale and propping of my pillows and a straightening of my sheets upon the couch. She would even go so far as to sit with me in the living room and rent old movies that she had gone to see with her father when she was a child. 

Like her own mother, she had a beautiful singing voice and loved musicals, I did too. I remember laying on the couch and listening to her sing along to the soundtrack. It was my greatest insight into her as a person, and I think I tried to emulate the characters that shone on the screen that held her interest – Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Cyd Charisse, Carol Burnett, Julie Andrews – their clothes, their style, their speech, their humor, their femininity. I began to mimic with some accuracy and regularity.

Which also brought me success with my beloved father.

 For the most part on most weekdays, I occupied myself with a couple of friends or the dog or the cat or my stuffed animals and Barbies. I didn’t really want for anything in my life, so I spent most days just sort of hanging around, reading and waiting until my dad came home. Like my mother, my dad was the highlight of my life – although unaware of the feeling, he would have put it as we thought “the sun shone out of his ass.” I would do or say anything that would make him smile because he was the one who really tried to connect with me since I was very young. He and I read together and would talk about different books, he took me fishing and taught me how to throw and catch a baseball, I learned how to play golf so I could play with him and my mom in Vermont. He was my real way into Kohlberg’s moral reasoning Stage 3, I felt loyal to him and wanted to do with all my heart what pleased him the most.

I guess I had a sort of double standard when it came to my mother and father, but I like to comfort myself by saying that I liked the things he liked because he would actually be interested in doing them with me, and when I did them right he would praise me to my face and to everyone around us. The real clincher was, he remembered and tried the things that I liked. I loved horses, so he would take me to go riding, he would help me brush and handle them, and eventually, he bought me my own.

Yes, I was the girl with the pony.

My sisters, who did not benefit as well from my parents’ middle aged wealth, never let me live that down. They can take comfort in the fact that my horse-owning days were pretty short-lived - my parents, when I was about sixteen, pretty much lost everything but our house. That changed so much of our life, but that is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Anyway, my dad loved a good story. In Vermont, he would laugh until tears ran down his faces as we sat and listened to the crazy stories the family would share at night. Or he would recount them, my father had a tendency to repeat himself, particularly as the Budweiser empties began to pile up in front of him, and I, being an annoyingly astute audience, would follow as the storylines shifted, the characters emerged or faded, as facts seemed distorted or exaggerated for humorous effect or a change of intention. Early on, my dad had been a poet of sorts, writing prolifically throughout school and his earlier life, even going so far as publishing one or two of his works during and shortly after college. But I think he suffered from the mindset of his generation, which Lily King in her novel Father Of The Rain, accurately notes as “caring too much about anything only sets you up to be the fool.” I don’t think he ever let himself care too much about his writing, because it made him vulnerable. As was publically acceptable, he only showed that he truly loved his family, but anything outside of that, was a weakness to be exploited. The man’s role was to be strong, wasn’t it?

He didn’t even show his deep faith in God publicly after a time. He had been involved in his church in his younger life, and could quote Bible passages if the occasion called for it and there were hard and set rules on what was right and what was wrong out there in the world. But he did not go to church. My mother went sporadically, I was baptized but never confirmed, my brother and sisters were, but by the time I came along, no one had the time to take me to Sunday School. My mom was again discouraged by me because I didn’t go along with her to help her set up communion when she had to go. I wanted to sleep in or watch Captain Bob.

It wasn’t until I approached my teen years that I got interested in going to church, which follows along Fowler’s ideas of religious development, the idea of poetic-conventional faith. My father’s mother, Grammy, attended church every Sunday and had always been adamant about getting me, “the heathen,” into Sunday School. So, I went. And I liked it. I became quite interested in the ideas and the life of Jesus and Bible study and sin and eternity. I read the Bible cover to cover a few times, I actually liked the Old Testament a lot. I liked God who handed down justice just as much I liked that he had a really nice son. According to Kohlberg, I was enjoying Stage 4 of moral development. I reveled in the idea that there were social rules and laws as well as universal ones. I felt closer to my Grammy, who had always been a distant and disdainful figure in my life. She thought I talked too much about things I didn’t know about and had no problem telling me or my mother or father about my impertinence. But as we sat together in church, we had a connection. It was short-lived, however, because my budding desire to be close to God was actually derailed by an embarrassing experience with my mom, one that I am not sure she had reason to think twice about.

On New Year’s Eve one year, oddly enough I was home with my parents rather than hanging with Ma, I wrote out a list of New Year’s Resolutions which I handed to my mother for her perusal and hopeful subsequent approval. She sat on the couch in our living room, and read them aloud, and when she came to the one that read, “Become more knowledgeable about the Lord,” she laughed. It was a short laugh – kind of a bark, “HA!” It sounds awful telling it like that, it was a sarcastic laugh, but it was based on the fact that I had shown such little interest in going with her to her church previously. I think she thought I was being funny.  It makes far more sense, looking back on it. Typical of Northeastern children, who are born and raised on a rich diet of sarcasm and scoff, I was a wise kid, well before Piaget would have considered me ready for abstract thought such as that. She thought that I was joking, and I, feeling hot in my cheeks, went along with it, “Ha!” I echoed. “Yes! Got you, Mom!”

I remember carrying out the charade with my Gram until about spring, but as soon as summer came along and we were off to Vermont, I had pretty much had my full of church.

Still typical of Fowler and in line with Kohlberg’s level 3 of postconventional moral reasoning, as a late stage adolescent at a Catholic (of all things for a WASP, but we were poor then, so somehow it made sense) all girls college, I delved into discovering other faiths, under the guise of my study of political science. As I sorted through this individuating reflective faith, I realized I loved reading through ancient mythologies and I especially liked seeming snootily worldly with my quotes from Jewish texts and the Koran and then Buddhist philosophies. But deeper than that, I enjoyed making connections and contrasting these ideas with my Protestant upbringing, and I liked having a different perspective that a lot of my Catholic peers. I was appreciated as well by my professors who noted that so many other students, like my own father, had deep feelings of “one way being the right way and one being wrong.” I liked that my expanding philosophies gave me opportunities for friendships and understandings of people I could not have earlier in my life, I developed a rich palette of affinities for different thinkers and doers, whose lifestyles perhaps could not be seen as favorable under a WASPy light. I liked that I was somehow betraying the life that had at that point all but destroyed my dad.

As I got older, got married, had children, I clung a little more tightly to Buddhism and Toltec teachings, they let me be a little more forgiving, more personally responsible, but as one of my Muslim friends laughingly pointed out to me, “That’s just the next step to atheism,” which in fact was completely true. Atheism is a tough run though. People have a hard time understanding it. They try to substitute science for psalms. What’s funny is, most people I talk to don’t think I have any religious understanding at all, but I must insist that I do. I didn't spent years reading through all those damned bibles for nothing.  I have had people question my morality and I often feel that unlike religions, where you could just say “I’m a Christian” or “I’m Jewish” and that would be that,  I have to justify my own ability to understand what’s right and what’s wrong. I have to explain how I see the concepts of love, or helping others, or kindness, or creation, or death. What people may not see about being what my Grammy called “a godless heathen” is that yes, you may only have to answer to yourself, but I have found I am harder on myself than any God could possibly be. But with all that scrutiny and explanation, I’m not really that open about it, honestly.

Like father, like daughter I suppose.