Maria Hill
I was born before the cultural uproar of the 1960s in the United States in the Greater Boston area of New England in the United States. My family was and is ultra-right-wing conservative and subscribes to the misogyny that goes with it. It was a shock! I also believe that it was an awakening.
I had no idea what I was dealing with, of course. You do not when you are young. I just knew that what I was experiencing was wrong. I could see that the good in me was not respected or appreciated, and I could not see why I could not get to a positive place with my family. What it did, however, was activate my curiosity, critical thinking skills, and anger. The anger was the hardest part because I had to hold it in the center of my body and gradually process it over time. It was very painful.
It took me a long time to overcome the trauma of the oppressive and exceptionally nasty environment I was born into. The world I grew up in was a prison that pretended to be otherwise. Although I was “allowed” to attend a great college, Tufts University, and worked in my father’s business to pay the tuition (it was possible to work your way through college then), I could not choose my courses. The legal age was 21, so I had no voice or choice. I had been ready to discover my place in the world but was stuck. (I tried but was not able to secure aid.) I was only allowed language courses that would make survival difficult in the world. There is nothing wrong with language courses, but since I had had them since I was a baby, it was time to move on.
Those kinds of barriers and injuries were common in my life back then. There was a prison I was not supposed to escape, but I had other ideas. The mentality that seeks to imprison is ludicrous to me. It is also unnecessary unless you are seeking free labor. After all, we all want a beautiful world to live in and are happy to contribute to it. It has been especially hard to come to terms with the familial patriarchy and, in my experience, an unwillingness to see the good in others.
The pretense of openness and possibility made the betrayals most sobering. In my family, there was a constant saying, ”There is always something you can do.” Such an open-minded and optimistic saying! I am a can-do person and problem-solver. What I did not know then was that I was being had. The relationships would never be mutual. We can question legitimately whether there was narcissism in my family, which there may well be, but whatever caused the choices made, they were not healthy.
As I look back now, I can see that there is an important and necessary requirement for real equality in a relationship, a family, and the world. There has to be an intention to create it. There was never any intention in my family, but I did not know it. I kept trying to get there but could not. They still have an energy of doing someone a favor to accept them, which is common in power-over systems, the patriarchy, and authoritarian societies, all of which were present in my early years.
I went out into the world and remember that, at the time, where women worked was called the “Pink Ghetto,” and that frightened me since we had just liberalized divorce laws and, in typical US fashion, had no family support laws in place. So I decided to get an MBA in order to put a floor under me, working days and attending school part-time in the evening. I graduated 10 years later.
In the interim, I started dating someone I met in a therapy group. We were both recovering from earlier marriages, but over time and with therapy, we developed a relationship that the therapist described as a good partnership which was my top priority in a marriage. Although he had custody of two sons, I thought we were on a solid foundation, and we married.
When we married, life changed immediately. His youngest decided to live with his mother, which began an 18-month legal drama that put us heavily in debt. It took 15 years to dig ourselves out from under and many interstate moves. Once through the recovery, I asked him to have a child with me, and he said he would if the child was ours. In an ever-optimistic fashion, I set out to make this happen and found an IVF doctor who agreed to work with us. When it actually became possible, my husband (now my ex) reneged.
So there I was in my early 40s, nothing had worked out in spite of my best efforts. I am scratching my head. Why did all this occur when I was only trying to get on my feet and have a life? Seriously! That really is not too much to ask!
So the grieving process that had in some ways been my life began anew this time because of childlessness. I picked myself up, went to art school, started learning about cultural systems, and eventually began my websites. In learning Spiral Dynamics, I began to connect the dots in a new way about how cultural systems develop and structure themselves. I also began to understand how we got to where we are now and the cultural transformation we are in.
I have felt disbelief my whole life at what our species has created and what is considered “good.” I am disgusted at the deceptions the human world is all built on. At least it is now being exposed for what it is. So many people have suffered because of it.
We need something new, but first, there has to be space for it. In doing the grief work of childlessness, I feel I have been in the process of creating that space in me and being a part of creating it in the world. I will continue to do so.
I also need to wear more pink.
