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“There are no parents in that picture.”
“I’m sure they’re just out of the lens. It says it’s says there’s a green slope. That’s a step above the potato patch. Still a bunny slope, though.”
“I don’t have ski clothes.”
She flipped to another picture to show Mary. A group of women in string bikinis that matched their ski boots, long flowing blond hair, and aviator glasses posed near the lodge. “Perfect tans. It says that skiing with the reflection of the sun on the surface means you get a full tan while exercising and having fun.”
“Yeah, I don’t know …”
“Listen to me. Usually, it’s you who's doing the pushing. It’s my adventure, so I feel not only entitled but also that it’s compulsory for me to do the same for you.”
“To me.”
“For you. We are so darned used to being mothers, to thinking through every possible bad scenario so we are prepared to handle it, to corralling and cheerleading and cajoling.”
“Cajoling, like you’re doing now?”
“No, I’m pushing. We promised to help each other through this transition.” She held up a finger to tick off her points. “We will try things that we think are for other people, not us. We will dare to fail and look stupid, so we have some personal grace to build new expertise. We will exercise our spontaneity muscle. See! See how great we did? I got the call, come and bring your friend. I knew exactly whom she meant. I knew my brother would hand me his points. And here we are, we embrace the possibilities!”
“Holy shit, do you hear yourself?”
“Sadly, I do. But I will remind you that I am paraphrasing you after you read that scientific study about word pairing.”
It was true. Mary had gone on a whole rant while Deidre had listened patiently through all of it. Mary was in her final class before her final exam in nursing school when her professor wanted to explain why women made up ninety-eight percent of the class.
Where were the men?
In the darkened auditorium, the professor asked the students to do a simple task. On the screen, a word or a name would show up. If it was a man’s name, they were to say left. If it was a woman’s name, they were to say right. If it was a scientific word, they were to say left. If it was a word associated with the home, they were to say right.
The hypothesis was that there were word pairings, things that “just went together,” without any thought, ketchup and mustard, cloak and dagger, king and queen. When we form a word pairing in our minds, it was hard to break free from putting those things together.
So, the words started flashing, too fast to think. It was a reflex that had Mary’s mouth saying, Stan left, Lab left, Kevin left, computer left, Pam right, laundry right, algorithm left, along with the more than one hundred students.
Never a hitch. Never a mistake.
“Now,” the professor had said, “we’re going to do it again. This time, I want you to make one change. The category for things associated with the home will go on the left with the male names, and the scientific words will go on the right with the female names.”
The words flashed. They all made mistakes, hesitated, whispered their answers where they had shouted them out with conviction in the last iteration. As the words kept coming, at first, Mary thought everyone, including her, was doing poorly on this task because they had just trained in the opposite way. The words kept coming. And once they’d been twice as long in this new configuration, they should be improving. They weren’t. They were getting worse. It was almost impossible for Mary to say Bob left and diaper changes left while putting Claudia on the right was easy. Putting the test tube over there had her stuttering.
Mary walked away from that experiment enraged.
All of her life, boxes.
All of her choices seemed to be a result of society funneling her down to a predetermined place, and she had no freedom of choice.
Nursing suddenly lost its appeal when one of the times they had all successfully categorized: “Theresa right. Nursing right.” The whole class was stunned. Three more words passed, and the professor had to roll her hand and say “left” to get the student body participating again.
It was at that moment that Mary knew that with her nursing exam complete, she would not follow the funnel. She was going to break free. She took a job in the Emergency Department to learn how to handle nursing under high pressure—high stakes. The mother of two (basically three, counting Deidre’s son) wild gorilla boys who loved nothing better than to test out Darwin’s survival theory, Mary found that she was good in that setting. But the next goal was to become a medical evacuation nurse, going to accidents to support the extractions and flying critical patients from small rural hospitals to larger trauma centers in the city.
Take that, society!
Not only that, but she wondered what other things she’d missed out on in her life because she thought they were only for “other people.” What fun things might be for her, too?
She liked to sing. She sucked at it. But why couldn’t she learn?
She liked to paint. She extra sucked at it. But why couldn’t she learn?
She had always found pole dancing to be beautiful and athletic. In her word pairing paradigm, pole dancing was for strippers and loose women. But why couldn’t someone who just liked the art form of pole dancing and wanted a more interesting way to build upper body strength than doing bicep curls? Yup that darned pairing crap was holding her back. She’d decided right then that she would look up local classes and swing from a pole.
