The Day I Became the Madwoman …
My girlfriends and I read the seminal feminist text, “The Madwoman in the Attic” at University in Scotland during the early ’90s. We were Gen-Xers, riding the coat-tail end of feminism’s second wave. Many of us were the first generation of women in our families to go to college …
We were so young; fresh and sweet for the picking. In our minds … okay in my mind I was Jane Eyre. Or at least I believed I had some of the same qualities as my favorite heroine: compassionate, kind, friendly, patient, caring. These descriptors aligned seamlessly with my Catholic upbringing. They represented what it meant to be a girl, then a young woman in my small corner of the world.
There was an implication that ran through our feminist studies, that women had already won the gender wars. We studied nineteenth-century women’s literature with both fascination and detachment. The violent, wild-haired, red-eyed Bertha Mason was nothing more than a literary figure for us. We didn’t judge her but she didn’t represent us in any way.
We weren’t the ‘angry’ feminists of the ’70s. We were new women, without the old barriers to success. The vote had long been ours, as had birth control. Men saw us as equals now, mostly. We liked men. We could do any kind of work we wanted and be anything we wanted. One caveat … we had to want it badly enough and work juuust a little harder for it.
How little I knew then or understood what life would have in store for us — what it would demand from us, and what it could cause us to become.
Fast forward through time, twenty-five years or so …
One of us had an abortion not long after graduation — (she became pregnant by the very same Professor who taught us to deconstruct feminist texts).
Another was lured into a predatory spiritual cult (and stayed there for ten years).
One of us struggled with a history of childhood sexual abuse.
Another languished with a mysterious illness (the doctors said it was all in her head).
Most of us got divorced and some re-married.
Some of us have taken or are currently taking some kind of anti-depressant.
We all have #metoo stories.
Each of us, without exception, has felt ‘crazy’ at some point in our lives. Most of us have in different ways, been called, or treated as ‘crazy’.
Through so many life-events, I personally never felt that I ever came close to being ‘crazy’, until my ex-husband began dating the woman who would eventually become his new wife.
A few weeks into the relationship, my daughter came home calling this other woman ‘mom’. It was sudden and swift, an unbearable stab in the heart.
Straight out of the gate, this ‘other mom’ began criticizing my ex and my already tenuous co-parenting relationship. Then she moved to our past parenting mistakes (we’d been too easy on my kid, she said). She implemented new house rules, which they expected to carry over to my house too. She complained about things I allowed my child to eat, and to do in her free time.
I fought back of course, refusing to cede my space to the interloper. She was furious. My ex-husband began accusing me of being ‘angry’, ‘irrational’ or ‘easily triggered’.
This is how it happens:
One day I drop my daughter off outside my ex-husband’s new four-bedroom suburban home. A home in the kind of neighborhood I will never be able to afford as a single mum. I’m usually semi-presentable, in accordance with my ‘good girl’ upbringing. On this day however, my hair is a mess and I haven’t applied a lick of make-up. I have my glasses on and I’m wearing the obligatory sweatpants of shame.
My ex comes out the front door, unexpectedly. He begins to lecture me about something I’d texted the wife. “You pushed things too far,” he chastises me. “You need to apologize to her. Re-build the relationship.”
I am incensed, “I’ve pushed things too far? I gasp incredulously. “What about all the things she’s said and done to me? What about the fact she makes my daughter call her ‘mom’? What about the fact that you’ve hi-jacked my daughter’s time and interfered in her relationship with me?”
I’m disheveled and unkempt, standing on his front lawn. My voice volume is rising. Months of pressure and pent-up anxiety, the fear of losing control, of the threat to my relationship with my daughter has brought me to a dangerous precipice. My ex is looking around, his eyes darting nervously. He has a ‘crazy lady’ on his front lawn and he needs to diffuse the situation fast. So he makes a blinding error in judgment and says:
“Just … take it easy. Calm down”.
I allow those words to push me over the edge. My hair is wild, my eyes are red and my anger is incandescent, blazing. “CALM DOWN?” I scream. “CALM DOWN? AFTER ALL THE HELL YOU’VE PUT US THROUGH?”
“I WILL NOT CALM DOWN, I WILL NOT SHUT UP. I WILL BE HEARD. I WILL APOLOGIZE TO NOBODY FOR ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN.”
I am female-furious to the max in that moment. I’m yelling in full view of the neighbors. To my mind, I’ve exhausted all the rational, logical means of defense and this embarrassing public melt-down is all that’s left to me. I feel ‘ugly’ and ‘othered’, embarrassed and ashamed. Yet it also feels simultaneously liberating, even exhilarating, and freeing.
Ahhh, I think to myself. This is how Bertha Mason must have felt.
I’m no longer ‘Jane Eyre’, the romantic heroine of my own life. I’m no longer pretty, compassionate, kind, patient or sweet. I’ve crossed over. I’m the Wicked Queen. I’m every archetype of every woman-gone-bad that ever existed. I am Bertha Mason, the Madwoman.
I drive away from his house that day having lost and yet gained something of my power. I feel a deeper kinship with every woman I’d ever seen righteously lose her shit — in novels, in real life, on TV, and in YouTube videos. I get it now. Those women are offered up as morality tales for us to mock and believe that we will never become. I will never judge those women ever again. I am those women.
Middle age caught my girlfriends and me by surprise. We were young and full of promise and then suddenly … not.
Back then we believed we had a voice, that we would be always be heard; that we would always command a certain level of respect by virtue of our intelligence and abilities, our ambition, our top-notch education. We didn’t believe in the Bertha Mason inside of us. We believed she’d been rendered unnecessary by our newfound ‘equality’.
We were never more wrong.
She’s still there, alive and kicking in all of us Gen-X women. She knows that the men we share our lives with have fared better, overall. They make more money than us in more prestigious careers. She’s keenly aware that our less qualified male cohorts still control our female-dominated professions. She knows that when they speak, people actually listen. She understands that women are still the ones who sacrifice our lives on the altar of family.
She knows that our lives are only marginally different or better than our mothers. She’s trying to protect us, in her way because now that we’re ‘middle aged’, and we’ve lost the illusory privilege of youth, our voices are still not being heard.
Can women ever speak out under patriarchy and NOT look crazy?
I don’t know the answer. I find the key and open the locked attic door to let out my inner Bertha. Her hair is long and matted. Her eyes are red from crying and her voice sore from screaming. Her fingernails are broken and bleeding from scratching at the attic walls. Her dress is ragged and her feet are bare.
I hug her gently, bring her downstairs and sit her at the kitchen table. I offer her a cup of CBD-laced green tea. We sit there quietly, as sisters together.
Contemplating our fate.
