There’s something we need in America. Forget statues of Confederate
soldiers. They fought for slavery. The Abandoned Woman: she deserves a monument.
That’s who deserves honor and glory.
Who do I mean? Let me give you a composite from my personal
experiences over the years. The following is no single person. She is, though,
as real as the computer on which I type. Everything I’m going to describe is
true. It all just happened to different people I’ve known. Consider a woman’s
story.
She didn’t attend college. Instead, she worked so her
husband could. Or, perhaps she married straight out of high school to a
promising young man and began raising the child they conceived together and she
birthed. (Notice I didn’t say “his child.” That term makes me nauseated).
Things went well until after that first child. Then she
changed. The change showed on a face beleaguered by the strains put on her by
colic, colds, bad tempers, diarrhea, teething, accidents, or the many other trials
of nurture that go unseen by husbands and friends.
Perhaps the change manifested itself by a weight gain. Maybe
the “ten” her husband described her as, to his friends, while the two had courted
slipped to an “eight.” Maybe she wasn’t as “hot to trot” as she had once been.
Maybe she just got older.
Her husband changed too. He was becoming successful, a
change he felt entitled him to the same marriage benefits as always. Besides,
the more successful he became, the more the younger women at work admired him.
His wife should as well, even as she washed his dirty underwear.
Then he met “Bambi” and everything changed. He hated to do
it, but, dammit, Bambi was still a “ten,” maybe even better. One night his
desires and disappointments collided and his wife and child were banished to a
friend’s house. She found a cheap apartment for the two of them. Divorce followed.
What’s an abandoned wife to do? First a job. She still had
skills, though they were rusty. She found a job typing and sued for child
support. The judge, an old friend of the ex-husband’s boss, awarded an amount
that was 21 dollars a month less than the cheapest child care center she could
find. It cost her “ex” so much that he had to forego membership in a more
prestigious duck club. He was kind enough to remind her of that often.
Once a month he would pick up his son for the weekend. It turns out that
Bambi’s family owned horses. The son would come home after the weekend spent
with his father and talk incessantly about riding horses and how much he looked
forward to the next visitation. Oh, and why couldn’t they have a horse?
The “father-son ecstasy” would not persist. Soon, Dad and Bambi
had their own child. It drew the attention. Then, the same weak moral standards
that caused Dad to abandon his first family finally cost him his job. Both the
visits and the child-support payments became “iffy.” In those days, there was
little recourse from an all-male judicial system.
The woman just worked harder. Sometimes there was a second
job that still allowed her care for the son. Maybe she attended night classes.
Maybe she found herself in a better job, training men to fill the position just
above hers. She thought of dating, but men wanted an unencumbered “ten” for
serious involvements. Even if she were still “hot to trot,” men weren’t
interested in long journeys, just short sprints around the track.
Why a monument to her? Just this: she survived, and that survival should be an inspiration to us all. Despite the abandonment,
the privation, and the fact that she worked for sixty cents on the dollar
compared to a male counterpart, she survived. It was a feat accomplished by a work
ethic and a monumental determination that might be compared in some aspects to the
strength of African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.
Yeah, I think she deserves a monument. After all, she didn’t
start out on her own with a gift of a college education and a million dollars.
She’s worth, though, a lot more than that.
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| To Moms |
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