Meeting Persephone

After 15 years of marriage, everyone finds they are making sacrifices. My marriage is no different.

I am married to a man who, when we first got together, was my virtual opposite. I thought for certain that marrying someone who is your opposite leaves a middle in which you can find balance and room for growth and communication. We do actually balance one another out pretty well - except when it comes to football (professional football). He likes dark meat on turkey - I like white meat. He loves all the chocolates in a box of chocolates that I don't like. Things have gone pretty darn well.

But as couples often do after 15 years we have grown more together. Neither of us are willing to give up our favorite football teams and root for one shared team. So he will remain a Broncos fan and I will remain a Raiders fan (did I mention that we were opposites? Nothing like favoring one another's team rival to drive home a point).

Politically we've gone through phases. When I was stuck in western Nebraska I became much more conservative than I'd ever thought possible - I blame it on the location. He'd always been more conservative while I'd always been the uber-liberal. Now we're coming together on my territory and he's becoming much more liberal. He's by no means a socialist - but he's certainly changed - and maybe even mellowed (ya know, with age).

So what are the things we do for love when balance seems to be so apparent? What sacrifices do we make? In a word - television. Yep, it's completely petty, but hey what do you want from someone who knows the value of having a dark meat eater in the house?

There is a new show on this season called 'Life on Mars'. I LOATHE this show. Initially I was going to give it a chance - the cars are great and you have to give them props for the music choices. But that all came to a screeching halt when the female officer entered the picture - the woman they so arrogantly call "No-Nuts". Get it? She has no penis and no testicles so her station at the "cop shop" is dictated by the sum of her body parts. And she has "no-nuts". Funny huh? The story line is that a cop from our current era is injured (and in a coma or dead - we don't know yet) but is somehow blasted back to 1973.

I was born in 1972. Specifically on the same exact f'ing day that Nixon was re-elected (what a thing to have to pack around with you as a liberal huh?). I'd always been very aware that my dad had expected me to be a boy, and before I was born he went out and bought baseball gloves, fishing poles, and footballs just for his new son. Instead he ended up with "no-nuts". My younger brother later inherited those "boy" things that had originally been bought for me.

It's not so much the show that I resent. It's the era. It makes me only too aware of why exactly my dad wouldn't have wanted a girl when women were so disregarded. Maybe he thought women had no potential or maybe he just knew life was generally easier for men. Sexual harrassment was a foreign concept as were female CEOs and apparently woman police officers as anything but band-aid applicators. Equal pay for equal work was a non-issue because women were barely entering competition in those areas that were dominated by men. Stay at home moms were still the "norm" and those women who did work were still teachers, nurses, and secretaries because the work force was not blown open for them yet to participate on any level they were driven to take on.

While we do have a LONG way to go to reach some sort of gender equality in our society, watching this show does make it apparent that we've come a long long long way on several fronts - gender as well as racial and sexual orientation lines.

But have we always been this way? Were we always divided along gender lines? Was there always a need for someone to be superior over someone else? What about the possibility of a time when we worked toward the common good of everyone instead of the good only of self? When we might have only taken what we needed instead of living in excess and overindulgence? When judgment was only given in regard to how someone contributed to the group rather than their gender, color, or what they did in bed and who they did it with? What if we worked for the "greater good" - you know, that phrase that has become some mythical term that nobody ever really seems to strive for or represent because it's become nothing but a campaign motto?

Can we make this world a better place for everyone who inhabits it without conditions and without keeping score? Are we capable of loving ourselves, each other, and the world that much?

Well if 35 years ago I would have been known as "no-nuts" and today nobody would dare to say that to my face and most wouldn't even dare to think it.... If, in less than 2 weeks we will have our first black President in the USA.... If the rest of the country can get on board and pass a Constitutional ammendment banning, not gay marriage, but restrictions on liberty and freedom for everyone so that "allowing" gay marriage would no longer be part of the vocabulary and questioning the "right" would seem foreign and strange.

Then maybe, just maybe, we will get there. Maybe my view of a better world isn't completely off the table - even if it is used as a political scare tactic today. Can we love each other that much?

My dad may not have wanted a girl when he got me, but by the time I was 15 I received the best complement I've ever gotten in my life and I got it from him. "There is something about you that could change this world".

I think there's something about all of us - if we choose to lead with love instead of self.