A natural World Order, Part III
Even more on how we lost our way
Part I proposed that pretending we’re all equal goes against nature that differentiated men and women like it did animals and plants. Part II explore how customs such as prayers developed over long periods of time, with a recent addition based on my Kuwaiti experience. Let me share how I arrived at the premise of a new/old world order, to restore a natural world order the subject of this mini-series.
Update: Part IV is here, the previous series A natural World Order continues here
I grew up from refugee Hungarian parents emigrated to France after the 1956 Uprising, then on the expat circuit as a youth until I settled in Calgary and did not follow my family back to France where they settled. My late Dad wouldn’t hurt a fly, was a jovial character and the life of the party, but behind closed doors was a different story: He blocked my Mum’s university education (she only graduated aged 51), he considered his children mini-me’s to fashion at will (basically failed with me and my sister but succeeded with benjamin brother)... He even attempted to match me up with suitable girls, planned my career for me sans consultation, and when I did my thesis my own way in Canada after they returned to France, he lifted it whole cloth in his magnum opus… without citing it! He was a hurt survivor of three occupations — Nazi and Soviet military during WWII and Soviet economic thereafter — and his Dad was equally hurt by WWI and its aftermath… in addition to the above!
I defined myself as the negative space around my family, left their faith as a teen and them altogether as a young adult. I also emigrated in turn from France to Canada, as I had suffered from the French school system — its militaristic Napoleonic roots meant in my experience, they tried to demolish me to mould me into an obedient citizen — and my saving grace was growing up on the expat circuit and especially travelling a lot — see my late Dad’s slide collection here and my travel trails video here — that gave me a different frame of reference and saved me from being eaten alive by either my family or my environs.
So I became a sensitive new age guy (humorous take here) and a feminist, not only to break from the past but as first step toward redefining myself in a positive space. Little did I know that after my first marriage failed — friendly, we just didn’t see eye-to-eye after a decade, she’s still here — and a few ups and downs inter-marriage, I would engage in a 30 year journey in my second marriage through co-counselling (my take here): in a nutshell, I recovered my Hungarian then my French and finally my refugee identities.
Yet the part I never understood is why not one but the two most committed persons in my life turned away from me? The first couldn’t adjust her lifestyle, when I lost my job and became an entrepreneur. The second ended up giving her love to our daughter instead of me. Not only that, but my daughter left me too based on my choices after I left, which were misunderstood and never corrected!
Basically a feminist man was abandoned three times by feminist women.
Needless to say I dropped that playbook! Thank God my Quaker community stuck with me, but not the local Co-counselling one my wife is with still — we were in fact the last functioning “married with children” in that group — although their Hungarian contingent abroad welcomed me online. I recently developed a new relationship online too, that returned me to some old principles discussed in the other series (start here). I’m about to meet my US sponsor who is devoted to me, and follows what I wrote in this series. We plan to model that in real life when we get together, as we both agree that online goes only so far (more here).
Polish aphorist poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec said “Pour remonter à la source, il faut nager à contre-courant” (to return to the source, you must go against the flow).
And I’m doing just that! Together with my Mum and my sponsor, both devout Catholics, and with my Texan prayer-friend cousin, not only did I regain my spirituality but I also re-joined the Catholic Church I was brought up in — see my spiritual journey in the intro here — and combined with my ability to reach my feelings thru co-counselling, I get a twofer (two-for-one): when I pray, it often cry and always get an all-encompassing sense of relief.
In fact my ground zero was when my first American prayer-friend said “… if counselling didn’t help [save your marriage] then have you tried praying?”
The reason I précised ‘American prayer-friend’ is that it’s part of returning to old values. I’d say half of my friends are American, and half of those are conservative Christians I observed with interest when I lived there as a Unitarian then. I mentioned here 5 yrs. ago the church-state dynamics in the US, which are very much in the news today, like for example here. But now I see that faith gave them a strength or resilience I lacked previously.
Ever since I started praying and going back to Mass, I feel the presence of God like I never did in either Unitarian or Quaker communities I attended the last 30 years. And as I navigate my post-marriage life, I find a solace in surrendering to God. That doesn’t mean I don’t work on my future, it simply means I do the work then let it be — “We plan, God decides” or “Aide toi, Dieu t’aidera” (help yourself, God will help you), respectively Biblical and Aesop / La Fontaine fables, also here— by letting go I find that not only do I relax and stop thinking about challenges all the time, but I find a higher entity that helps me pause and consider consequences, even back off when I’m wrong.
I remember that apologising in my previous marriages never achieved a thing. While I cannot comment on the other side, I often wondered if I came across as insincere? Now I think that my middle class white professional managerial mind never really let go of the facts as I saw them, but others sensed that, and thus never ‘got’ my apologies, as they didn’t see me let go of the facts as I saw them.
I found feminist women too busy watching for misogynist booby traps to actually see what’s in front of them— I was living with this alter-ego they reacted to, who was not me… they behaved like I was a sexist male boor I didn’t recognise and had no idea where it came from, as I know I’m a good man and a good father… with issues for sure but no misogynist!— so I got the worst of both worlds: I made sure women got a fair shake, and then I was abandoned by the very ones I supported — I sometimes wonder what took me so long to leave this marriage in fact — and I unearthed this very unpopular notion of misandry (Wikipedia), although I neither claim its equivalence with misogyny nor intend it as an anti-feminist backlash: I simply want to point out that women make mistakes too, and we should stop misdirecting (here, different context) toward men whenever that is pointed out… Millennia of male oppression make it hard for women to be shown mistakes by their oppressors!
Feminist women I knew did not seem to understand that feminist men are isolated by men, for supporting women against privileges they had themselves for millennia. And when feminist women turned against me, was I not totally isolated?
So now I have a partner devoted to me, who not only lets me but wants me to lead her — one reason she picked me for the orphanage project (here) is that she wants a man to lead it — and I can exercise full extent of my empathy and caring others failed to see in me. For being a leader comes with duties as well as privileges. I described the two-way system that entails in §5 of the first of this mini-series here.
This concludes a little background on how I got here in this mini-series, where Part I laid out the premise, Part II explored some ramifications.
