The generation above mine worked long and earnestly for years to overcome gender stereotypes. Through effort and perseverance, keen leadership and insistence, the idea that all women had to be tiny-waisted, home-tidying, husband-seeking and spider-fearing was tossed into a historical fire. It burns for very good reasons: it’s misrepresentative, dismissive and inaccurate. That stereotype is as false as a Barbie doll.
And so, it was a surprise to recognize myself in it.
I was wearing the wrong pair of glasses as usual, working on something or other at the kitchen table. These days, my three pairs of glasses keep wandering off, and while we’re on the subject of aging, the radio news anchor has grown irritatingly soft. My husband was at the other end of the room, getting ready to open the oven door and check on a loaf of bread he was proofing. The door is heavy, and as he cracked it, something small and gray and speedy leapt out and raced across the kitchen floor. I am very sorry to say that when it did, I screamed.
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Maybe you have not listened to yourself scream. Maybe you’re one of those forbearing people who never scream. I used to view myself that way, and your time is coming. This peculiar sound was a medley of heavy metal and opera, without any actual music involved. I had never heard the vocal range before; overtones of high squeak, undertones of tuba. Terror gives a voice to many shades.
As I screamed, the Small Something fled into the bathroom off the kitchen. My intrepid husband—living up to a gender stereotype of his own—followed after it immediately. He did not scream, and his manliness in that moment was almost unfathomable.
I was not on top of a chair (none was available), but was heading toward the stairs when he re-emerged from the bathroom. Something round and grey hung from one hand as he crossed the room towards me. Good money says that I made that peculiar sound again, having mastered the technique.
The wrong pair of glasses finally focused when he was close enough, and here is the most painful part of a reluctant memory. In his palm, he held an oversized rubber wine bottle cork. It had been lying on the counter above the oven and had rolled onto and across the floor with the force of the door opening.
To be clear: I screamed at a mouse that was a cork. Call it poor eyesight, call it impulse, call it instinct. Or, you could sadly argue, this was the way a stereotype might act. After so many years of feminist struggle, no one wants to admit that, and certainly I don’t. My self-image has been opposite; someone not tiny-waisted who didn’t hold marriage as the ultimate goal, and has a refrigerator filled with what was once food and is now a fungal experiment.
Confession does not make me happy. But a scream is a scream and truth is truth.
Elissa Ely writes about seniors/baby boomers for The Belmont Voice. She is a community psychiatrist.
