I would be scared of anyone who was attracted to me right now

Photo credit: virginmedia.com

This is a quote from Et tu Husband which has become bed-time reading for me lately.

Yes. Until we fix ourselves we can go on attracting the same type of garbage.

Lately I have been feeling totally fine without a man in my life for the first time. Thought it might be the beginnings of menopause! (I'm only 44 though and no other symptoms as of yet) ... it'd be a shame.

...or more a sort of way of protecting myself from predatory men who see me as a weak animal ready for attack.

Something like when I tore my ligament and all my muscles went on strike to protect the knee. This is something I have to go through to know what I want.

And Ex 23 is definitately a preditor if not an SA. However much I may believe that I love him. A healthy choice about this is pending.

Cosy Suburbia

Photo credit: dunnepropertymanagement.co.ie

I walk through a leafy suburb peering through the windows of those (ostensibly) well ordered homes, and realise I am yearning for the some sort of middle-class existence that I always thought I would have, and cannot accept that I do not and will not. But I came close, yet only when in the clutches of a manipulative, sociopathic sex addict. Sigh choices, choices...

A recurring theme

Just reading back the last four posts, it seems I am on a theme. Perhaps it's no wonder nobody has commented because if they did they would have to say "Get over yourself". Here I am bleating about the choices I made in life, blaming it on men and trying (without effect or resolution) to turn the personal into the political.

The facts are;
(1) I was not lucky, savvy or calculating enough to find myself a man who earned a living AND was nice to me and
(2) now I am afraid of facing the future, with possible declining health, and definite decline in my own attractiveness, and supporting my child, based solely on my own resources.

Mac-Feminism

I apologise, I had breakfast at MacDonalds this morning. Nasty capitalist world dominating institution that it is. It does rather good Sausage and Egg Muffins. I sat down and got my laptop out, and whilst it was firing up, I looked around. The place was literally full of young, poor, single mothers - whiling away a few hours with their legions of pre-school children. I must be getting old but a thought popped into my head - "What is the world coming to?" or more specifically "Is this what feminism has acheived for us?"

I'm sure its not what the suffragettes and early feminists envisaged for us they were trying to release us from domestic slavery, to give us choices. Instead we have the right to stay home with our kids on the breadline. With the freedom to work nights pole dancing and get a boob-job.

But its not the young middle class girls who find themselves in this predicament, it is the young working class girls. There is no shame in being a single mother now, and women are equal to men. They can go out, get drunk, have anonymous sex...

The young middle class girls I assume supported by Mum and Dad as ever have a termination or two, get through uni, live with their boyfriend for 5-10 years and if they're lucky he marries them. Then they can have a couple of kids and she has a get out clause via the current legal system to be supported by him until the children grow up. Lucky?? alternatively he could realise just as her ovaries are packing up that he doesn't want marriage and kids, at least not with her, and leave her possibly unfulfilled but probably with career in tact.

What honestly is the incentive for men to get married and/or have kids? They can have a lover, a fellow wage slave, home comforts, they can say they're not ready for kids or commitment, they can go on like this for decades.

For women the picture is rather different. If you leave your run too late you may never be a mother, if you get pregnant young and single with an impoverished man and don't terminate the pregnancy you sentence yourself to a lifetime of hard-labour (single parenting) and scupper all your chances at education. So the minority, smart university educated women go Jane Austen style - and snare themselves someone who has career prospects and can support you in the style you would like to become accustomed to. Who could blame them? Cohabitation is all very well, the court will recognise de facto relationships but nothing is quite as concrete as a good old wedding certificate.

Being an educated, middle aged, single parent, I increasingly find myself sympathising with both young poor single parents and fathers in single income families.

Later: I had a couple more thoughts. For the younger poorer girls it is often a rational choice too. Have a baby and get out of home and be supported by the government if there is no dad around.

But here's the thing, many Western goverments have the following philosophy about children:

If the husband can't pay, then the dad should pay, if the dad can't pay then the step-dad should pay, if the step-dad can't pay then the government will pay.

How is this empowering to women? maybe in my case.... if none of the above can/will pay she can pay herself.

Mid Life Crisis

No, its no use, that's what it is. I can't deny it anymore.

When I see those manicured SAHMs with their matching LL Bean kids pulling out of the drive of their holiday home in their top of the range 4WD I can't help asking...

what did they do to deserve that???

shag a banker is what...

or a lawyer,
or a doctor,
or a diplomat...

and more specifically have children with them so they are locked in financially to all eternity..

But in truth, that just sounds bitter. I have my self esteem. I didn't sweat over that science homework, university entrance, graduate school for nothing! No! I get to be an underpaid single parent member of the intelligensia living in a rented apartment. I am not materialistic! Where is all this claptrap coming from?

I think I am angry with myself for not playing my cards better. The choices you make at 21 have a significant impact on your lifestyle at 42 there's just no way of getting around that one. You might marry for love, take the moral high ground, save the whales, see the world, believe in the power of one whatever, but it won't get you a chef''s kitchen and holidays in Martinique.

And worse despite working hard all your life you might end up in poverty. I think perhaps my awesome childhood raised my expectations that if I worked hard a reasonable lifestyle would come my way, and relying on a man was just a weak and inappropriate way of going about it. I did expect that whatever man I ended up with would work as hard as me, and treat me with the same benevolence, honesty and integrity with which I treat them. Wrong again.

No feminism has not delivered. A colder more calculating way of getting your man and seeing your main chance even if you are highly qualified yourself is a better strategy, because basically men have not evolved. They will rarely enter into a genuinely equal partnership. They need to be teased, cajoled, pampered and played like this and have the bar set high for them. Otherwise they just behave in the lowest way they can get away with.