The first woman in my life was my mother. She fed me, bathed me and calmed my anxious mind. As I grew her involvement in my life faded. I fed myself, bathed myself and found other ways to assuage my anxieties. But our bond was strong, or so I thought. Shortly after my seventeenth birthday she (and my father) urged me to leave home. They left brochures where I could easily see them about colleges and military branches. My mother talked incessantly about the “future” and “independence”. So after months of constant prodding, on the day after I graduated from high school, I was virtually forced to leave home and board a train for basic training. My mother had put aside all that we had together and sent me, a naïve seventeen year old boy, out into the cruel world to face the biggest “mother” of them all, my drill sergeant.
Although my mother was the first woman in my young life, she wasn’t the only one. I also have a younger sister. When my sister was just four or five years old she took on the role of dominating supervisor and sneaky informer. Using her wily feminine instincts she brought me, and my three brothers, under her imperious command. No minor breach of family law would be missed nor go unreported. No brotherly jest would be allowed to go unpunished. To this day my sister, by a glance and the simple phrase “you’d better do what I ask or I’ll tell Mom that you’re a bum” can get me and my brothers to do her bidding.
But there was another woman in my life in my last couple of years of high school. She was my one true love. At least she was my one true love at that time. My high school sweetheart stole my heart. We were inseparable and deeply in lust, I mean love. We talked of our life together after I had established myself at a permanent base in the Air Force. We talked of children and home and enduring faithfulness. Two weeks after leaving home I got a letter from her. She talked of “space”, “moving on”, “seeing other people” and “Calvin”. Calvin was her new true love.
After an appropriate five or six weeks of deep mourning for my severe loss I made up my mind to move on and make the best of life. Basic training was over and I was assigned to a base in Florida. So I started a life of work and attempted debauchery. The more women I could meet the more debauchery I could indulge in. And I met a lot of girls and a woman or two. Unfortunately debauchery wasn’t on their minds as much as it was on mine. In fact, after a while I had to settle for a couple of nice girl friends who insisted that I meet their families and join them for dinner on the weekend. I gained weight but very little worldly experience.
Four years later I was a civilian again. It was then that I knew that I should settle down and lead a civilized life. I dated a few young ladies. “Dating” in those days meant taking a girl out to dinner and a movie or maybe a hockey game. “Dating” nowadays means something entirely different. On that scale of difference dating today is doing what married folks learned to do after four or five years back then. Anyway, I found a girl I particularly liked. We started seeing each other and love blossomed. Engagement and a wedding followed as naturally as life allows. And now forty years later we are still in love, still married and occasionally speaking to each other. I’m just kidding about that last bit. We speak to each other most of the time; she speaks, I say “yes dear’.
But just because I’ve been a happily married man for all this time doesn’t mean that there haven’t been other women in my life. Why, immediately upon getting married I was trapped in a relationship with another woman. It was sort of a hate, hate relationship. My mother-in-law (May she rest in peace) came into my life and stayed there a long, long time. She never lived with us, but her presence was never far from my mind. I tried to like her and get along with her. But for some reason she never liked me. Her animosity towards me may have started on the day that her precious evil cat attacked my leg and I kicked it across the room and into her china cabinet. The cat never recovered from that incident and neither did the relationship between my mother-in-law and me.
Two other very important women came into my life seven years apart. A little over a year after our marriage a young girl took up residence in our home. She stayed for twenty some years. Seven years after she moved in another girl came along. She only stayed about eighteen years. My wife got along very well with these two interlopers. As a matter of fact, over time, she got along with them better than I did, although I’ve always maintained a special relationship with both of our daughters.
Of course there have been other women I have known. Sisters-in-law, cousins, aunts and others have played their roles in how I view women. As a modern man I guess you can say I like and appreciate women. I don’t understand them of course. I’m not that modern. But as life moves along and I slip into my dotage I hope to continue to have relationships with the feminine gender. After all, they’re much more interesting and are usually better smelling than men.
Have a fine day.
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