The decision to get an education should not be an either/or decision

The other night, before I went to bed, I was going over how I got Here--this unmarried state without children.

I had said to Steady Eddie earlier in the day that I would have liked to have got an education *and* had a family, but it didn't work out that way.

I had to make a choice.

After I got accepted to Smith, and told everybody I was going, everybody got mad at me. I was told there wasn't any money--even though I was a grown up and didn't need nor want my parents' money. The whole "there's no money for you to go to college" was b.s. anyway. That's the same thing they told my godmother when she got a scholarship to Parson's School of Design.

The Matriarchs had decided that she didn't need the education, that she needed to get married and have babies. She pursued art and design her whole life. But was never really happy to have been forced to give up that education.

That dream.

I was expected to give up my dream of an education, stay home (as I was told by my mother-in-law) put my husband through college, and have babies.

I wanted something different. I wanted the education. I wanted family too, but I wasn't able to have that. I had to make a choice....

So, as I was standing at the edge of my bed, the lives of all the women in my mother's family flashed across my mind....(I never knew much about my father's family except his aunts got welfare and I was forbidden ever to go on welfare. Everything else is a mystery...)

So, here's what happens, mostly and somewhat generally, to the women in my mother's highly matriarchal family:

--Most everyone finishes high school, esp. the first generation. Some don't. One left school in the 1950's to marry (she was 16.) Others dropped out. One became a drug addict. but that was later....

--Most end up working in factories or office work of some kind.

--one, a stripper. who got her LPN. then went back to stripping for a bit. as I understand now, she's suffering from early onset Alzheimer's. She's not even 60.

--One went to college. She met some sharpie Italian boy, and quit college to get married. Used all the money her architect father had put away for her on a huge Italian wedding. They ended up divorced. Her second wedding was much smaller. She's still married to that guy.

--The rest don't even get to college. or, never finish.

--Everyone, except my one aunt, who was always "crazy," have kids. My "crazy" aunt may not have been able to have children because of botched abortions in the 1940's. That might have helped push her over the edge.

--One other cousin decided not to have children because she has a serious illness and takes some very powerful meds. But, that may have changed as she neared 40. I have no idea. She's got 5 brothers, and they all have kids. That may be enough kids for her.

--Even the drug addict has kids.

I really wanted something different from what I saw growing up. Most of it was never happy. Kids were manipulated by the Matriarchs. The guys got to do things, and all of them either went into the military or finished college or both. Women got married to whomever and had babies. I was to aspire to only marry well, if that.

I wanted an education. I wanted my own business. I wanted a husband, and I wanted to be loved. But I didn't want to be dependent on a man for my identity, nor did I want to give up my dreams to make his dreams come true.

I wanted all the stuff that a working-class woman is forbidden to have.

When some things in life are forbidden, getting them becomes an either/or choice. Either you follow what the Matriarchs want--you do what is in your station in life. You stay put.

Or, you go your own way. You make your own life.

As I look around my teeny-tiny apartment on the main drag of a small New England town, I think about how I've done my best to make my own life because I wasn't supposed to have an education, or a life where I was independent, making my own way.

I never realized that I was making my own way because I was fighting all those Matriarchal ghosts telling me what to do and how to do it, getting in my way and, at times, making me a damned unpleasant person.

They're going away, slowly--as I realize what I've built (with much help), slowly.

This has been an awful fight.

But as I slow down, and put things in perspective, I realize I've done things that no woman in the family has ever done.

Not that there's anyone who really cares.

Other than me.

And I guess, in the end, it's about how I'm going to live with myself. If I didn't do this, if I didn't get an education, if I didn't pursue creating my own business, then I don't know if I could have been able to live with myself.

I don't know if a child could have been enough--or if I would have ended up one of those angry, disappointed mothers who puts all her broken dreams into her child and orchestrates the child's life.

Yes, that's a family pattern too--one I didn't want to have anything to deal with. I didn't want to take out my disappointed life on a child and make that child be me.

Either/or. Get my education, have my life, so I don't hurt someone else and screw up his/her life. Give up family because the Matriarchs say you can't have a family and have an education....

I know there isn't much time to have a family. At middle age, a baby's just too much. But there are kinds of family that I can have.

Stranger things have happened in my life....

who knows...