My Mother
She was a great lady.
She was the seventh of twelve children. Her father was a successful business man in the cosmopolitan city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).
When she was sixteen, she opened the front door for a man she knew and trusted because he was one of her father's business partners. He raped her in the foyer of her own home.
Although people imagine that rape is a violent, brutal crime, it frequently is not particularly violent, especially in acquaintance rape which is far more common than the imagined scenario of being brutally assaulted in a dark alley by a total stranger.
It's an ugly, ugly crime that can leave a woman physically and psychologically impaired for life, but the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent.
As such, rape is a crime that may leave little to no evidence. It's often a he said, she said situation.
Although her parents had moved the family to the country during World War II and provided remarkable protection for the kids under difficult circumstances, with multiple children still to support and raise, her father sided with his business partner.
She fled East Germany for West Germany not long after, I think at age seventeen. She never spoke to her father again though he lived to age 96, probably more than four decades.
I'm a recovered rape survivor and survivor of incest twice over in part because my mother was open about having been raped at age sixteen at a time when planet Earth still felt that being raped shamed the victim and it was a dirty secret she should hide.
My mother explicitly taught me "The shame is on the rapist." and explicitly taught me "The world needs to learn that."
This idea that the woman's character or reputation is harmed by the abusive choices of other people is quite old. The Christian Bible documents this ugly idea in Luke 7:36-50.
It says a "sinful" woman washes the feet of Jesus with her tears and dries them with her hair. My understanding is this woman was a prostitute.
To this day, prostitutes are typically forced into it or feel forced into it because they need the money and can find no other means to adequately support themselves. At that time, my understanding is it was very much forced upon a woman and having been forced into prostitution, leaving it wasn't an option.
I have heard that the concept of "make a good woman out of her" dates to the taming of the American Wild West when enough women began showing up that whorehouses began being less common. Some of those prostitutes married and became respectable people.
I would like to think Jesus was TRYING to tell the people listening "She's allowed to stop being a prostitute. Let her " but unfortunately his framing defacto agrees with blaming her and probably wasn't successful.
She committed no sin. She was victimized and shouldn't be a prisoner forever of the crimes of other people because most likely someone raped her and then pimped her.
"Forgiving her sins" reinforces the idea that she did something wrong. This idea needs to DIE if we are ever going to achieve something akin to equality.
My mother wanted to be a doctor and my father pursued her hard. I believe she intentionally sabotaged my desire to be good at women's work and intentionally denied me the opportunity to marry a well-heeled older man at a young age for the express purpose of making sure I did not end up like her.
After marrying well at an early age, she ended up being "the maid" because that's what decades as a homemaker prepared her for. She frequently bitched at my father "I HAD a maid when I first married you. Now I AM the maid."
She spent her final years after my father's death on a limited income and in relative poverty compared to what she had for most of her life. This is more or less the norm for most women who get most of their income from marriage, often even if they do have a career but it's especially bad if they don't.
I think my mother hoped I would get a clue younger than she did and have a real career and not do what she did, which is an extremely common story. Everyone knows it and yet no one seems to be really trying to tackle the problem.
Jack
Jack gave me Space to Grow. Like my mother, he kind of denied me the opportunity to marry well as the solution to my problems, thereby leaving me the hope of eventually supporting myself.
It's not as simple as that. He also was respecting MY decision to refuse to marry well because it likely would have cost me my life, given my medical situation.
And unlike multiple other men, he allowed me to remain in his social circle after realizing he and I weren't going to get together romantically.
I've never met the man and haven't spoken to him in years, but he contributed a great deal to my life, probably in part because he's a high school drop out and self made millionaire, so he didn't expect success to come easily for me yet still chose to not rescue me and not snuff out the possibility I might eventually get there, though the road would be long and hard.
I always had enormous respect for the fact that he was a high school drop out and successful businessman but stopped talking about it because people tended to down vote it, like they thought I was insulting him rather than saying "He's a self made man and you have to respect him."
There was a lot I didn't initially see when I first met him and it took me a long, long time to be able to see it. This entire blog is an ode to the value I place on being helped to realize those blind spots existed and to try to magically find some means to see what had been invisible to me for so long, so everything here is in some sense a note of gratitude to Jack.
He let me have that opportunity and that was a hard thing to do and required enormous character for a long list of reasons.
Paul
I know Jack at all because of Paul and my guess is he was more aware than most of the quiet raging drama between Jack and I that played out over years. And Paul also is the architect of the halls where I learned so many things, though I believe he only ever spoke to me once.
I don't really know Paul, but I feel this list would be incomplete without his name.
If I am not a completely deluded nutter and actually see farther than average in some important way, it's in part because of being carried on the shoulders of these three giants.