The Power of Polarity Between Men and Women
Women don’t need to be like a man to be powerful.
When I was young, my grandmother told me it was more important to be strong and independent rather than to rely on a man. In fact, she went so far as to say that I didn’t need a man in my life at all. It wasn’t that she was necessarily prejudiced against men and boys. Quite the contrary in that her adoration for the males in our family shone just as bright as for the females. Though, to understand her feelings about men is to acknowledge that she was born in an era when being a woman meant domestic submission and servitude — appeasing the male species.
It was during the 1950s when my grandmother was a young mother of four little children when her husband walked out, leaving her to raise his children with no financial support or co-parenting help, and without so much as a ‘goodbye, Charlie’.
So long, British barnstormer.
I never knew you.
The grandfather I never met was an aviator who took flight from a family who would never once relinquish their long-held grudge for his abandonment. Not even in the face of his attempts to make contact with his grown children decades later, including his only son, my father.
That was the loyalty and love that my grandmother had collected from her children, who…
