The Ungluing (Chapter Six)
Happy Sunday, lovely readers and dear friends,
We now continue reading “The Ungluing: Why Does a Woman Take Second Place in Her Own Life” a book written in 1974 by Magi Mooney (my mom) and Phyllis Lublin (the woman who wanted to share Magi’s story with the world). This book has laid dormant in a file cabinet for 50 years come 2024. It is time for the world to understand how the patriarchal system in place for eons has been no boon to women; in fact, it has created a system that turns women into chattel and men their subjugators. As we see, the feelings of two women in 1974 are hardly different from the feelings of women today.
And now, let’s continue….
Magi: Poor Mama wasn't really gaining a son, she was losing her daughter! At least it looked that way. But we went to Chicago right after the wedding and, because absence makes the heart grow fonder, all the hostility that I had felt seemed to have dissipated. Her influence, the church influence, and the whole societal structure had set me up to parody the "happy housewife" role. And wasn't I? I could do anything I wanted to.
I said to Joe, after we got married, and I said it because I felt I had to say it, "Well, maybe we'd better have some while we're still young." I said, "New vistas would open up to us." To myself I thought, "If I don't have one, well, at least I would have gone on record saying we should." Privately, I felt too, that I was beyond creating too many of my own. After all, I was almost thirty-four years old. But I went into a marriage relationship with full consent and absolute trust. I knew that God wasn't going to send me any more babies than I could handle. This had been my persuasion. But in my very deep innermost, I felt I would be lucky and not have them. I thought God was going to be good to me. I really believed in God's will and if God does give me a baby then I know God will provide! Mama told me that all my life, "God will provide." Now I'm asking, provide what?
Joe and I became man and wife. Joe was still a man. I turned into a wife. Well, I put on the role of wife, read the Bible, and performed according to Proverbs, Paul, et al. I was Mrs. M. living first in Chicago.
Phyllis: Then came the children.
I wasn't overly anxious to have children, but having been raised as a staunch Catholic, there was no way I was not going to perform according to the holy Roman Catholic church.
P: Where were the kids born?
We moved from city to city. Two of the kids were born in Galesburg, Illinois, home of Knox College. I did a little nursing there when Patti (firstborn) was a baby, but then, when I had to pay for her to be babysat... She was my first baby, and I looked at her, and wanted to see that "first smile." I don't know whether it was the money so much... I figure I had to pay this woman half of what I make. I have to go and really shuffle for it, and here she's enjoying my little baby.
P: She was taking away from you... double.
She was taking away from me, and if it was such a joy, she shouldn't get so much money for it. And there was a real dichotomy there; what was at stake, the money or the baby. Well, then there was really no issue because I got pregnant again! So then I thought I might as well stay home and do the mother things. I cleaned and I socialized. What did I do in Galesburg? We lived in an upper flat. It wasn't even a flat, it was like an attic room made into rooms. One big bedroom, one big toilet that had been a bedroom and they just put a toilet in.
P: It was communal living way back then.
Yes, communal living, and Mrs. Wilson who lost her husband, living downstairs and her mother and father. I kind of adopted them right off.
P: Why wouldn't they take care of the children for free while you worked?
No, because nobody, she never did have children in her life, but it's just that nobody does anything for nothing except a wife.
Galesburg was kind of nice, small town. We liked to golf, Joe and I. It was like a big country club once I got to know a few people, got inside the clan. I was able to wiggle myself inside and make a couple of friendships through the nursing part, which was one of the ways I was saved. This other nurse and I, we'd go places together.
P: There was a nice feeling of identity, and you had one baby, with another on the way.
And I died when Joe Jr. was born because I hemorrhaged and had to go back to the hospital. All my vital signs had gone, and I was bleeding and bleeding, but I thought to myself, "I'm invincible. I'm not going to bleed to death." I had a sluggish uterus and I guess my age had something to do with it. I'm sure it didn't help much. So I went back to the hospital and this nurse took care of the babies, and I felt Joe standing next to the bed. I thought, gee, he looks so forlorn there and scared because the nun was rushing around. I was conscious, with my eyes closed and my vital signs all gone, but I was conscious of all this excitement I had created. The nun yelled, "Go get the syringe and run!" They were going to get an IV started to get me back because they couldn't get a blood pressure, and I'm saying to myself, "Now she's not very professional!" Here I was analyzing while I was dying! Well, that night, when everything was okay, they brought back my vitals, she came in, and her name was Sister Innocent -- innocent. And she gave me hell for coming in all blue.
P: You were a nurse. You should have known better.
She had just administered on the delivery table to a woman who had died, and when they brought me in and she looked down and saw her in me, I guess it really blasted her.
P: Two in one day!
Two in one day. And here I was a nurse and should have known better. She made me wish that I had died! I'd come back to get this kind of bullshit! She was really excited and angry. And this is what puzzles me, that she should have been so angry. I didn't know what I was doing. I thought the bleeding would stop momentarily. Well, anyhow, I got better and came back... came back to have four more! The next two, Jeanne and Tom, were born in the city of Chicago. I kind of hated to leave Galesburg and those 75-cent green fees! But I was very careful after these two were born, and the doctor was forewarned. He knew about my uterus so he would give me medication, you know, to contract the uterus.
P: Your uterus needed to be calmed down.
You're right! And I was nursing the babies, too. And then we had the fourth child, and the landlord came by and said that we'd have to find a bigger place to live. "It isn't fair to the baby to have to be squeezed in with another baby," he told us. And besides, the people upstairs had been complaining about the noise we were making downstairs. Never mind that she had three active children up there that were jumping off furniture. We were the noisy ones, and he would take her word against mine. And I used to feel kind of paranoid because I tried so hard to be a good neighbor. I was a real Christian after I got married, and I really wanted to be the nicest woman in town! I wanted to be a good model for my children and a good wife for Joe. And I'd go to church, not every day then because the kids were kind of little, and I didn't want to leave them with Joe. I had to take care of the family.
I hadn't gotten the church bit every day, but we did go to church every Sunday, and we took the kids with us. We weren't going to force them to go alone so we had to set the example. We went to worship, we took the babies, all six of them, after a while. I used to sit in the cry room until I was able to control the crying.
P: The cry room?
It's a room for mothers with small children so they won't disturb the service. Well, I didn't want to sit in the cry room. I was going to be such a fantastic mother that these kids would know that when they're in the house of God they would be respectful. And I was so proud. They all sat like little robots with this mass going on that they couldn't understand. There was really nothing in it for them. They were told to be good, so they were good. In fact, one time, I'll never forget it. One of the little guys was acting up, so I took him, I smiled, I crunched my teeth together, I picked him up, smilingly. I was fire inside, and I took him outside and I took his little pants down, looked him square in the face, and spanked his little bottom and told him if he ever embarrassed me in church again, I'd kill him! So, we went back, and I never had trouble in church again. Because a good mother won't wait for the proper moment. If this transgression takes place, right there and then, it must be talked to or punished so that it would leave a message. Mothers leave messages, not scars! Well, anyway, we moved from that place. That nice guy had us move.
We moved to Bellwood, Illinois. That was a nice community. That's where I had the other two little girls, Rita, and Margie. But not before I had a four-year rest with two spontaneous abortions. See, I could have had eight children because I had two little abortions... bad implantations. So, I had a potential eight babies in me. But Mama said, "You just get as many babies out of you as God has in there for you."
P: You could have had a lot more. You missed some!
Well, no, God just gave me a many as I could take care of. You know, I never questioned that premise then. With the ability to use different things and the pill was around. But I was so hooked on the Bible. It was so ingrained in me, really ingrained. The warp and the woof of my life was the flood. I could see it as real. The whole world is wiped out and there's one little boat rocking around and these are all the good people. And I wanted to identify with good people, and this is such a rotten world. And I brought these six kids into this world so I had to be a force that they could see that they could grow from and become future leaders. I had made future leaders! That was kind of mind-boggling, so then I had to search every way of being a good director, so I had to start reading. I read everything from Spock to Ganot, Kraft to Freud. Never mind that they had never been in my position. Maybe they'd fathered but never mothered.
And the children came one after another and I let them. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. They were cute and I didn't have much else to do because I really did everything I wanted to before they came. I had pursued other job opportunities, twelve different kinds, and they were OK, and they did pay by the hour, but who would ever consider anyone not spending their lives doing for others and not having a joy in the satisfaction of it? "A man's work is from sun to sun, a woman's work is never done." And when I got tired, I would offer it up. I knew that, miraculously, I would get a surge of strength. It never occurred to me that I wasn't being very smart in permitting myself the luxury of creating six human beings and becoming their model... A model which, incidentally, cannot function in the capacity of leader because of the no-status place this human being holds in a society which is money- and not satisfaction-oriented. The socioeconomics of society does not balance. It's not that we should have a new math, but that we should take the old yardstick that we've been using which gives the genders a false concept of values.
P: If women work for satisfaction and men work for money, then women should be able to buy things using satisfaction for barter!
Right.
(To be continued…….)