When I was in the depths of my marriage, I went back to college to become a special education teacher.
At the end of two long years of classes, I had my Internship Year, which is known everywhere else as student teaching. My first semester was my special education placement, and I was in a school with a woman who was famous in the urban district in which I’d previously worked. When I told my former colleagues that I was working with Katie, they just sighed while looking into the middle distance.
Katie was divorced–loudly and unapologetically. She was also high-energy brilliant, but we all know which of these is more important. I felt a kind of fear around her, like if I didn’t hold my ground my feet would slip out from under me. One day, she was talking about her hot mess of teenaged children, her condo, and the minivan that served as a relic of her marriage to “that asshole”. While I was politely listening and wondering when we were going to get to the teaching, a voice from my reptilian brain said, clear as a bell, “She just didn’t try hard enough.”
In the midst of the rage after my own divorce was finalized, this came back to haunt me. I was pacing the downstairs of my crappy, expensive rental house while my kids were at their father’s when it flooded back. My hands flew to my face as my eyes started to burn with the coming tears. I realized that I had been a fucking cunt.
I took a lot of philosophy classes in college and I’d never been comfortable with Plato. The idea of soldiers only seeing the shadows of reality on the wall of a cave seemed reductive and kind of lazy. However, as an older and wiser woman I know that sometimes this is devastatingly true.
When I was married, I had been looking at the shadow on the wall of what I was supposed to be as a wife and mother and defining my entire life around being of service to men and children, when really all I was seeing was a shadow. And now that I’ve turned around, seen the truth, and exited the cave altogether, I have to admit that Plato was right.
If you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had been raised in a tradition of powerful women who just happened to have large numbers of children. They commanded the room and were considered brash, their laughs were too loud and they were comically delusional in thinking that they knew the ways of men. How could they? They’d been in a house raising children their whole lives.
At the same time, they were revered for their amazing brains: my paternal grandmother had been the third woman to graduate from a major polytechnical university in New England and the first to graduate from its architecture program. My grandmother on my mother’s side knew the stats of the Detroit Tigers like the back of her hand.
However, neither of these women, even my brilliant, visionary, trailblazing architect grandmother, served any real economic purpose. When they married, they were strictly mothers. Their purpose and contribution to society was their children. This was more important than anything else and was the crux of their value, to the point that they weren’t allowed to work outside the home. The children were more important than any money they could bring in.
I’d like to say that it was just the times, but it continues to a certain extent today. I know. I stayed home with my children under the guise that we couldn’t afford child care.
This tradition of service, in the shadows of the cave, looks like the responsibility of mothers in a gauzy haze of love for their children since the beginning of time. Their devotion looks like a potent combination of hormones and duty that is built on sacrifice but is worth it for the love and connection.
However, the reality is that the structure of the American family balances on the fact that we have reduced children to resources that are so valuable that the primary function of their mothers is to ensure they become contributing members of society. Children, whether we’re able to admit it or not, are potential economic units that in the future will produce the labor–and therefore dollars–to keep the future economy running as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, it is hoped that they will continue its inevitable expansion as America retains its economic primacy.
It all falls apart, however, when this family structure evaporates. What happens if a woman is brave enough to go against the primary economic provider for the family–the children’s father–and go out on her own?
They’re called custody battles for a reason. Assets are divided, and that includes the children. Attorneys must determine not only the value of the house, cars, and the 401k, but they also have to quantify and balance out time with the kids. Who owns these precious, potential means of production?
The end run of associating the family with capitalism is that when the family breaks down, it is the woman who suffers. The reason a family dissolves is usually associated with morality, because that’s what we’ve been led to believe that a family is based on. But in the end, in the final quantifying, it turns out that the economic value of the unit of production is greater than the moral, somewhat romantic shadows created by the fire in the cave. And this is where it can get ugly.
Consider the women after the contract is officially broken by the court and they’re left alone in a house with children who are a little bit lost and definitely unmoored. If a woman dares to be proud of what she’s done, and dares to create a new type of family instead of pining away for what she’s lost in depression, substance abuse, shame, or a combination of all three, there are definite consequences.
She’s creating something for these young economic units outside of the realm of to whom they really belong. She’s sneaking around outside of the purview of not only men in general but, more importantly, out of the realm of the man who owned them. The children are resources that belong to the man who was kind enough to put her in charge of maintaining the children. In the shadow of the cave, this kindness was duty. When you turn around and look at the objects in the fire, the kindness turns out to have teeth.
This woman has forgotten that she does not own them. They are resources that she has stolen. She is brashly claiming something as her own that she has no right to, that does not belong to her, and is nurturing and training them outside of the male gaze.
The act of creating something beautiful out of change makes her a dissident, to be sure. But in the eyes of those in charge, she is a thief.