When I posted a recent Dispatch (Who Loves Ya', Baby?) I was reminded of something I had just read and thought it related to the subject at hand.
The book is The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends, bu Judith Balaban Quine. Published more than 30 years ago, the book explores the lives and friendships of the six women who stood with Princess Grace on her wedding day, a fairy-tale day that many of us remember from our childhood. These women grew up in the 1930s and 40s, married in the 50s, and raised the generation that came to be known as The Baby Boom.
This book was a glimpse into a world I knew existed but where I had never lived.
It's an interesting read, a glimpse at a tiny sliver of society that many of us never knew. They were children of privilege, possibly the last generation to know both privilege and privacy. The press frenzy surrounding the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco was a precursor of the paparazzi and the 24-hour celebrity news cycle in which we now live.
I confess to several eye-rolling moments as I read about the difficulties these women went through. I don't mean to trivialize their problems, but the plain fact is that whatever they endured, they did it in apartments in New York City, hillside homes in Hollywood, and far-flung locations around the globe. Financial hardships meant their children went to public school.
As I said, a world most of us never knew.
But late in the book as she describes yet another broken marriage, Quine says, "To be fair, he [the husband] was victimized by what most men of our generation suffered from-the middle-aged delayed take. Most of us, as wives, had waited so long to identify the things that bothered us in our marriages that by the time we did decide to address them, they appeared like a range of unscalable precipices. Astonished to find themselves suddenly cast as villains in our lives, most of our men did not know how to relinquish the role. They were just doing what had been all right for years, and now suddenly it was all wrong." (pp 338-9)
Sometimes it can feel like climbing a tall peak in a tank top and flip flops, but figuring out what you need is worth the effort.
This is the generation of women, and men, who raised us Boomers. We learned our gender roles, our family roles, our societal roles, from them. Often we carried those roles, those definitions of our place in society and in our own intimate relationships, into adulthood.
We carried these roles into our creative lives.
When I spoke of honesty in discussing what we need as creatives, this is the kind of deeply-ingrained attitude we are fighting in having that difficult and painful conversation; admitting what we truly need and asking for it. We have been raised to believe that asking for what we need in that way is selfish, that it somehow cheats our families of what they need. This isn’t a gender issue, just as the husbands in Quine’s book were blindsided by these changes, so are partners of all types when we finally admit what we need.
Yeah, kind of like this. When you find you're paddling in opposite directions you need to stop and figure out where you want to go. Together.
And by delaying that discussion it comes as an unpleasant and often unwelcome surprise to our partners.
Defeating those attitudes for all our intimate relationships has been one of the biggest challenges for the Baby Boom generation. We were raised in the 50s with the same traditional roles as our parents-the roles Quine talks about in her book-and ran headlong into the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and women's liberation. These upheavals of the second half of the century questioned every attitude we were raised with, and presented us with a whole new worldview. But old habits die hard and those attitudes were planted early and buried deep.
They are attitudes my husband and I have fought our entire marriage.
Before I go any farther, I want to put this right up front. I absolutely won the in-law sweepstakes, in every way. Even when they didn't understand what we were doing, my husband's parents and his brother have been nothing but loving and supportive, and I feel immensely privileged to have become a part of such an amazing family. My apologies to those of you who had to settle for second-best!
My husband and I are not what those post-war parents envisioned as a traditional couple. When we married I was older, divorced, had a couple half-grown kids, and a large extended family. Steve was nine years younger, never married, and the much-loved older son of a small family. His father's job had moved them around the country many times as he grew up, bonding them into a small, tight-knit unit. His brother was his best friend in those years, and his extended family was often distant.
It took effort and honesty for our families to see what we were doing. To understand just how important it was for me to support Steve's desire to "tell stories," and to continue that support even when he didn't become a mega-best-seller and support me in the style to which I would have liked to become accustomed. That support was cemented early on when we had a frank discussion of what we wanted for life, and his simple answer was “I want to tell stories” with no limitations on what form that story-telling might take. His vision, so clear and inclusive gave me the determination to make his dream a reality.
With the perspective of our 37 years together (I am still boggled by that number!) I now realize that that support may well have also been driven in part by my own creative spirit. I somehow recognized the importance of his deep need to create, maybe even saw it reflected in my own hidden needs, and embraced the opportunity to support and encourage his creative endeavors.
I think that was reflected in how I described our relationship. Early on I chose to reject the rather pejorative term "working wife." Instead I called myself a "patron of the arts." It was a small thing, and perhaps rather silly, but it reinforced my respect for and appreciation of what he was doing. It recognized that there was value in his work, and it laid the foundation for him to value my creativity.
DaVinci created this portrait of Isabella d'Etre, one of his patrons. I have a tiny pencil sketch my husband made of me one day while he was waiting for me to get off work. I treasure that drawing, and the connection I feel each time I look at it.
Marrying another writer – even though it took me two tries to figure it out – was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Marrying someone with the generosity of spirit and the willingness to support my creative dreams was the greatest good fortune imaginable.
But that good fortune was more than luck, it was also the result of some brutally honest, and sometimes difficult, conversations. It was the result of each of us being able to ask for what we wanted and needed, and having a partner who was willing to accept and support those dreams.
I wish each of you the courage to have those conversations, and a partner who will share your dreams and help you get what you need to achieve them.