A Lineage Of Good Women
On breaking family curses
I went to see my mother earlier this week, as you know. The trip has left me thinking about the people I come from and how my integrity practice relates to them.
I’ll offer you an old story and a newer one. The old story is about my Great-Great-Grandmother on my father’s side. Her name was Viletta, and at twenty-three years old she was raped in the snow outside her parents’ house by her brothers’ friend. She then discovered she was pregnant. When her brothers went to her rapist to insist he marry Viletta he swore the baby wasn’t his and tried to pin the pregnancy on another young man in the neighborhood.
There’s no way of knowing if Viletta would have been better off if her brothers bought this story, but they didn’t. Viletta Woodring was married to her rapist, Ben Confer, in 1860 and subsequently suffered through 15 pregnancies and the deaths of four of her children by the time she was 43. Another daughter died later, just short of her 21st birthday. All of this transpired while Viletta continued to be abused by her husband.
Finally, when they were both in their early fifties, Ben injured himself during haying and had to be institutionalized. This was the first freedom Viletta had had in 30 years and she was, according to my grandfather, eager to enjoy the rest of her life. Instead, her son Charlie checked his father out of the institution without informing her and delivered Ben home as a “surprise”, smirking as he told her that he’d “brought her something.”
Luckily for Viletta, Ben was incapacitated enough that he couldn’t abuse her anymore. He just required her constant care and attention until his death more than 20 years later.
She spent nearly 60 years married to her rapist and abuser— caring for him, bearing his children, trying to eke out some kind of life for herself— as if that was okay. As if it was all just the cross that God had tasked her with bearing.
The newer story is a shorter one. It involves my Grandma Mary, my mother’s mother. Anyone who has followed this newsletter for any length of time knows I loved my Grandma Mary fiercely. She was charming, imaginative, adventurous, and loving. She was also married for decades to my grandfather, who was an alcoholic and a gambler. She swore he was the love of her life, but his tendency to burn through money created years of hardship and poverty.
He died when he was in his early fifties of liver disease, ten years before I was born. You don’t die that young of liver disease unless you have been drinking heavily and often for years upon years. Yet, when I finally found the courage to ask my grandmother what it was like for her to live with my grandfather’s alcoholism she simply replied, “Oh, Asha, your grandfather wasn’t an alcoholic! He never drank in the house!”
It’s worth meditating on what motivates you to return to your integrity practice over and over again, even when the consequences are heavy and it would be so much simpler to act as if nothing matters. Even when you screw up completely or your expectations feel so far up in the clouds that you’ll never reach them from way down here on this messy Earth.
For me, breaking generations-old cycles of abuse and addiction brings me back to my integrity practice every day. I come from long lines of women who, despite whatever affection or love they offered, suffered at the hands of the men in their lives. In response, they crafted their identities around keeping their heads down, taking care of business, and spinning stories to justify it all. To be fair, their communities and families encouraged this self-abnegation and dishonesty, painting it as virtuous. They were “good” women in the eyes of society, bearing their burdens with grace.
I have no desire to be a good woman.
What I want is to be a fierce woman. A formidable woman. A free woman.
What I am is a smart woman, a loving woman, a strong woman. I am sometimes also an angry woman. A woman who is not always patient or selfless, often judgmental, and occasionally unkind. In other words, I am a whole, imperfect human being. A real person, not a saint.
The only way to be a good, saintly woman, like so many of the women of my lineage, is to deny reality. Deny abuse. Deny addiction. Deny having needs. Deny the necessity of boundaries. Deny the very existence of a self who deserves freedom and satisfaction. Live in this denial long enough and you work a dark magic upon yourself. You are cursed by your own hand to be less capable, less powerful, less truthful, less free.
I practice integrity to break that curse, to be a different kind of woman for myself, my children, and whoever comes after. This lineage will be fierce, formidable, and free starting with me, no matter the cost.
What motivates you to return to your integrity practice over and over again?
Speaking of freedom for women, did you know that the Equal Rights Amendment has been fully ratified and is simply waiting on the Acting Archivist at the National Archives to sign it and publish it in the federal register? At that point, it becomes the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and provides a possible path to protecting abortion rights. Not to mention rights for transgender people and queer folks.
Except the White House is holding things up.
To learn more, read this interview by Lyz Lenz with human rights lawyer Kate Kelly. Then join Vote Equality to help move this long overdue amendment forward.
Hell yea Sister!!!