Do Life Your Way

Using the previous parable "People on the Porch", I would like to illustrate further that regardless of how you live your life, not only individuals but also society in general would have conflicting views on almost any given situation. For instance, what are "good parents" these days? Are they ones that teach their children financial discipline, or that give their child everything they did not have when growing up? Though it would seem a matter of personal preference, society has assumed the persona of individual preference by stigmatizing social behavior according to mainstream definitions. It is a social crime to be overweight now, or to smoke. This is a type of social tyranny.

I will give you a perfect example that will prove the inconsistencies and confusion that lie at the epitome of mainstream American thinking. I entered my marriage with the mindset that I would support my wife while she bare our children and stayed home to rear them, at least until they reached school age. Then she could pursue a career. I believed then, with all pride and dignity, that this noble and conservative effort at supporting my family - me being the breadwinner - would draw praise from everywhere. Boy was I a fool.

My wife and I have 5 children and for nine years I supported her through her pregnancies and labors, night feedings, changings, weanings, and trainings. I worked full-time and came home and unselfishly threw my check on the table and said to her "Just pay the bills, feed us, and buy yourself something nice every now and then and that's all I ask, I'll work for us all. That way, you can concentrate on the kids until they start school."

I was - and still am - a firm believer that children should be close to their mothers the first 4 years of their life. Not going to day cares or in the company of a sitter, especially if the child is less than 6-months-old. I believe that a woman is naturally blessed and better equipped at nurturing babies and young children, more than any man or baby-sitter could ever be. We both agreed and lived this way for nine years, me working and her staying home and rearing our children.

You would not believe the opposition we met by mainstream idealist, especially working mothers. To them, I was a dog and an oppressor and a womanizer. I supposedly manipulated this woman - my own wife - into staying home with all these kids and denied her a life, a life of independence and self-sufficiency. I denied her a right to freedom and liberation and to expand and follow her dreams. I was the embodiment of a sexist pig, a Neanderthalistic, obscure traditionalist. After an unsuccessful period of justifying my decision to people I though had some sense and would understand, I gave up, waved, and walked on by.

Since I was the only one working we did not have much money, just enough to pay the bills and buy the kids and ourselves something every now and then. We did not even have enough to feed our selves well, so I - let me repeat that - I, suggested she go and apply for assistance, as in food stamps. Oh what disgusting, poverty-prone words. Nevertheless, we survived. People would wonder why we did not have this and that such as cell-phones, CD players, and a new car. To them (society) we were living below the poverty line. Nobility mattered none.

To say the least, my extended family looked at this setup and shook their heads. They attributed our poverty-stricken life to my wife's not having a job. How she just sat around the house doing nothing and living off my hard-earned dollars. How she looked like a ghetto child standing in the food-stamp line waiting on our monthly handout with all these kids sitting in unison wiping their noses and wearing thrift-store clothes. This lazy, no good welfare recipient, gold digging piece of human flesh, she ought to be ashamed of her self. This was my family's view.

The rest of society, women in particular, sneered at my wife whispering how she is pathetic. How she should leave this no good man and get herself a job. They threw their job titles and office meetings in her face and arrogantly snatched around their one child wearing the Michael Jordan's and the Tommy Hilfiger craps. They tried talking to her and encourage her to leave this God-awful life and get with the program; the program of clothes and hair styles and nails, and new compact cars and take advantage of that good looking man over their and have a little fun with him and her friends.

This is actually how we looked to society. This was our life for nine years. We were poor and were struggling, always asking family and sometimes friends for a loan. But somehow we stayed happy. Through all the persecution, my wife and I were happy with one another and with our family life. One thing that made it all worth it, was that for every person or family we met while enduring this life, friends, teachers, relatives, and neighbors, they all had one compliment even through all of the defamation; we had good kids.

Not by choice but by circumstance our life changed dramatically in a period of one year. The table turned 180 degrees and she was working and I was home with the kids. With just one simple turn of events, we made everyone before us liars and all the labels applied to us untrue. Now, I was not a no good man because I was not being oppressive and sexist, and my wife was not a good-for-nothing recipient or hopeless old maid, now I was a no good man because I was not working and I was a bum living off a woman.

I - in the view of society - had no real goals or drive about myself and was a sorry case of a man and a bad example to my kids. My wife was a bad mother because she left the kids everyday and went to work. Too concerned with her self and her career to have time for her own children. She was a fool for supporting a man who had no job and who took classes to camouflage his inability to succeed in the American work force. Everyone knows that when a woman supports a man who goes to school, when he gets his degree and a good job he is going to leave her for another woman. This is what we are facing now. This is the life we live to society.

So either way, I am not a complete man in the eyes of people, family members, and society and my wife is not a complete woman. Not any more. At one time we would have been the model citizens of the community, a credit to the family lifestyle and a poster child for American propaganda. I now understand that the only way we could have actually obtained that status is if from the beginning we both worked and remained that way unto this day.

If we never choose to raise our children based on tradition and natural law but instead jammed them into daycare slots, if we had purchased two new cars, went into debt, never applied for food stamps, bragged about our jobs, cheated on each other once in awhile, and maybe bought a house, we would be the perfect married couple as defined by society today.

Who knows which way our life will turn in the next year or five or ten years. The situation could change dramatically again. I could finish school and get a good job and actually stay with my wife, which would probably make me a lovesick fool. My wife could possibly advance in her career and make twice the money I will ever make for the rest of my life, which would make her a feminist work-a-holic. Our children could end up all graduating college and pursuing successful careers, which would make them sell-outs to the Black race and usable peons to the white. Or we could all just walk by and wave.

© 2003 by C.R. Hamilton