A Woman Speaks

A WOMAN SPEAKS

Dear Friends,

I've been letting your question percolate for two weeks. My experience living in a family of men is that what you mention rings true. I have no- ticed, and continue to notice, that when I am with my husband and my sons they tend to listen to each other more than they listen to me. Sometimes this happens as a simple omission: we are walking on a trail, or through a city, all talking together, and suddenly they are in step ahead of me, three abreast, talking to each oth- er.

This dynamic, a mild sense of alienation, began with the boys' puberty, and I have often consid- ered it a matter of the frequency, the octave, in which men speak and women don't.

When my older son’s voice was changing there were a few months when I couldn't hear him. My ears were listening for his voice in the upper register, and he was speaking in deeper tones. One day I was standing at the stove and half- heard someone talking, but didn’t really connect to what was being said. My son came right up to me, turned me around and said into my face, "Mom, I'm talking to you!"

I finally got it that he was speaking somewhere where I wasn't hearing him. He was in his place now, not mine.

One morning years ago I shoot out of the house after making breakfast, happy to be in my own octave for a bit. I’m walking at a good pace, not quite running away, but almost.

I find myself in a dip in the road above our house with two bulls from neighboring farms flanking me, one on either side. The bulls are bellowing at one another across the divide, vying for dominance in a deafening duet. Later this same week one of them, the huge red bull from the farm on the north side of the road, breaks out through the barbed wire around his field and in through the barbed wire of the farm on the south side of the road, and is whupped soundly by his angus rival.

I stop in my tracks and stand in the center of the road between the two bulls—one red with spots and one solid black—leaning into the bellowing, surrounded by this wall of force. I feel it vibrate in my bones and muscles, my cells.

This feels familiar.

From then on I can identify the male energies in my household as a felt thing, an objective force. As I know they feel mine.

In this same era of raising boys and being sere- naded by bulls, I was traveling a lot. I would fly off for a week or two at a time and leave them to fend for themselves, which they did neatly for the most part. The trip in question was in the summer, and as I ran around organizing my

clothes and personal necessities, my teaching materials, adapters, a computer, I was also putting some dinners in the freezer to take the pressure off of my husband who feeds the herd while I’m gone.

When I arrive in a monastery near Barcelona, in the summer in the heat, and unpack my suit- case, my underwear is made conspicuous by its absence. Second only to the time I was driving over the Alleghenies to teach for a weekend and realized that I had forgotten my suitcase alto- gether. That time I had to stop in a mining town to buy clothes.

This time my stack of underwear, carefully fold- ed and prepared for packing, is discovered by the men at home. One of them opens the freez- er and spots it there, on top of the ice trays. He summons the other two, who stand with him, freezer door open, peering inside.

“Well, she must want them there,” they reason, and close the freezer door.

1. 1.