Is It Culture Change or Attitude Change

Someone on a Riding Mower Mowing

Not too long ago, I was caught off guard when the man who mows my 2-acre yard with his zero-turn made a comment that I initially took as misogynistic. Then I took into account the fact that he's a 56-year-old man of color in small-town Alabama, born and raised, and it got me to thinking about my reaction.

When he showed up to mow one Saturday morning, he commented on the fact that the pile of pallets he's been mowing around for a year or so was gone. I proudly responded, "Yeah, the 17-year-old neighbor boy and I got out here and built the raised planters with them, and then I dragged the broken pallets over to the burn pile myself after my helper neglected to do so when he said he would and never came back to do it for me. I strained my back, but I got it done, finally."

His response was, "You're a woman. You shouldn't be out here doing this kind of work." That's the comment that set off my misogynistic alarm bells. Then I realized he wasn't attempting to be that way; he was simply relaying what he had been taught in his upbringing. He was raised in a household with a mom and a dad who had their own roles within the household, and that's how he perceived the world should function.

What he didn't understand is that not every woman has a man to do things for them. He knows I live alone and have no family nearby. Knowing this, he still shakes his head that I live here alone with my two dogs and manage this place by myself, because in his mind, a woman needs a man. I grew up with grandparents on both sides who were married for over 50 years, and aunts and uncles married for equally as long on my mother's side. All of which maried in their teens. So I get the concept of marriage and having a partner in life.

However, I also lost my father in a car accident when I was 5-years-old and watched my mother become a serial dater who was married 4 times trying to achieve this goal. Even when she was married, it was typically just my sister, mom, and I who did everything around the house, because the men my mother married were not the supportive kind of men; they were users and conmen who saw a strong, capable woman and wanted someone to take care of them in exchange for minimal efforts on their part. These relationships were always volatile and full of conflict, which made for a very unstable home life. Yet, she managed to make her 4th marriage last for 27-years until he died. By the end, people around them, including family, figured they hated each other and just stayed together for the familiarity and because they had been together so long. It wasn't until after my stepfather died that my mother began to show some feelings of loss. But, even then, they were not feelings of lost love as she showed for decades towards my father (her high school sweetheart that she married at 16) after he died. They were more loss of having someone.

I've struggled my entire life with relationships and understanding how to blend the positive aspects of previous generations' roles within the relationship, and the attitudes of the post "women's revolution" men that I have found to dominate my dating pool.

Man Typing on Computer

Now you may say that my dating pool must not have been very large. But I assure you it has been all encompassing, younger and older (by a decade or more in some cases), same age, traditional, internet, friend introductions, inter-cultural, -inter-racial, it's been the full gamut of dating options. And what I find seems to attract towards me are those men who talk a great game about wanting to be a team and work together as an equal partnership, and then when it comes to holding up their end of the bargain, they just want a strong woman to support and take care of them. OR the complete opposite, they want to change who I am completely and domesticate me in a very unfamiliar way to do what they say is my role, and let them make all the decisions for me. Sorry, neither of these situations works for me.

I've been married twice, once when I was 18, and then again at 24. The first husband had mental health issues and was abusive, with the entire marriage lasting less than two years, and the second, I'll talk about later. I've been divorced from my second husband for 28-years now, and when we were married, I was the primary bread-winner who did almost everything at home except mow the lawn, and sometimes did that. I did all of the child rearing and looked after my husband, until exhaustion and frustration at not being heard when I said I needed more help from him finally took over, and I called it quits.

Working Single Mom

People often asked me during my 20 ought years of single motherhood how I could do it? My response has always been the same: I divorced my eldest child so that I could focus on the two children I brought into this world, and my life got immensely easier. That said, it does not mean my life got easy, just easier, because I had one less thing to juggle, one less person spending more money than they were bringing in, and one less person to feel responsible for. Other than that, I was still doing the same stuff I had always been doing.

Growing up in a household comprised of my sister, mother, myself, and the occasional man who infiltrated our dynamic, I was raised doing it all, so it wasn't difficult to believe that I could, or should be doing it all once I was grown and on my own. Even growing up spending an abundance of time in my grandparents' homes, it was still an everyone pitched in when needed environment, no matter what the work was, whether it was in the garden, trimming and bundling tree branches, or cooking and mopping. I was raised believing that if there's work to be done, you pitch in and it gets done faster and better for everyone.

Sadly, on the whole, that philosophy doesn't seem to have survived the test of time. Many of the younger generation that I come across have no concept of this idea, and the neighbors helping neighbors because at some point they're probably going to need some help in return philosophy has become difficult to see as well. If there's no pay in it, then people just don't seem to have any drive to help or care how much of a bad situation you're in. Again, this has been my experience for at least the past decade of moving around and meeting new people in different parts of the country.

So, if this only helps or works for pay or reward is the new philosophy, how is a woman who lives alone on a minimal income and a tight budget supposed to get things done, if they don't do it themselves? This is where my quandary stems from. If a woman has only had herself to rely on, how is she supposed to believe that a woman needs a man?