Rights to self-determination

Sometimes I joke — I am a man in a woman’s body. That’s why my life was the way it was or is the way it is. What was my life? I got married at 18, had three daughters, left my husband at age 24. I grew up. After two years I lived with someone else, had a son, broke up again after six years.

Finally, I learned my lesson. Marriage is not for me. I get tired of it after six years. I might be a relationship type but only if someone comes along who really fascinates me, something hard to do because I am pretty smart though I must concede that even smart women become pretty dumb sometimes.

I am a very independent person, an independent earner and an independent thinker. I act according to the way I think and feel. Contrary to popular lore, I don’t believe that thinking and feeling are different things. I don’t believe that one thinks without emotions, that thinking is a brain thing and feeling is a heart thing. I believe that your brain and your heart are connected, must behave as one or you are not being honest with yourself. For me that is the most important thing — being honest with yourself even when you disagree with most of the world.

Okay, there are times when you are in a quandary. I was once over my mother. I brought her home during her last years of Alzheimer’s disease. We used to have a beautiful relationship. She and I were family. My father was killed by the Japanese during the last world war. At 70, she got Alzheimer’s disease and she hated me, really turned around and hated me. She was so difficult and so expensive to take care of that I finally decided to put her in a home and visit her once a week.

As her Alzheimer’s progressed, she hated me more. I had to put up a shield of protection around me whenever I visited her then relinquish it afterwards. Sometimes it took days and I would go around feeling confused because my mind and heart were not in the same place.

My brain told me my mother was sick and I had to accept her behavior no matter what. My heart? It was pulverized. Sometimes I just wanted to disappear from her life to spare myself the shock, humiliation, embarrassment. But I did not because in one thing my brain and my heart were united — I loved her. So even if my mind and heart disagreed on many minor points — the way she would not look at me, the way she called my paintings ugly, the way she would shout at me and push me away — they agreed on the big point: I loved her.

Sometimes the conflict is different. You are married. You run into your first boyfriend, your first love. You have coffee. You find yourself whirling in the same tizzy that you thought you had long forgotten. But you have a husband . . . and grown-up children . . . and no money of your own. Ah, what do you do? If you were a man you would have an affair, knowing that you love your wife and children and would not leave them, but your passion for your first love is not to be denied. You probably also know that passion wears out in about two-and-a-half years to four years max. If you’re a man you don’t worry much about public opinion — except that your wife might hear about it.

If you’re a woman, you worry about what your husband and what other people might say. They will ask what kind of woman you are, what kind of mother, what kind of wife? It is harder for the woman to decide. Usually she says no but spends a longer time longing for the first love, imagining him with her, feeling the old passion once again all by herself. Why? Because women have been raised with such a fear of public opinion it gets in the way of their finding their own happiness or a better way of learning hard lessons.

What am I saying here? Am I recommending that women who find themselves in the situation I described should just pursue the romance with their first love, hide it from their husbands as they would hide it from their wives? No. I believe it depends on what the woman wants to do. She should have the freedom to determine what she wants to do.

Women have equal rights as men. I came across a term I like better: self-determination. We — men and women — must have the right to self-determination, meaning the right to determine what we want for ourselves without intrusion from the public – family, church and state.

We may afterwards determine that we want to surrender ourselves to the church, government or to family. Or we may determine to live by our own rules. Whichever we choose should be respected by others without censure. They should not censure us and we should never censure them. As I write this I realize that I may be dreaming of a perfect world, paradise, where mythically Adam and Eve walked around naked, without censure, until they talked to the snake.

I think the answer to building a better world is to teach people the need to look inside themselves and emerge with deeper knowledge so they can determine what they want to be, how they want to act, how to live honestly and not to conceal anything because of shame. They take risks. They fail. They must be able to admit and say, yes, I was wrong about that, but I learned my lesson.

Then maybe we can stop corruption, lead better lives, become better people.

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