Like so much water

I feel like every day I am talking to a woman who is completely overwhelmed, involved in a serious relationship with a man who is mostly experiencing the same things but seems to be dealing with them much better. What is that about?

I come from a long line of depressed women. My grandmother, when she found out she was pregnant with my mother (her surprise 3rd child), had a nervous breakdown and began her daily supplement of valium and the occasional tip-toe through the tulips. In turn, feeling the weight of being the unwanted child, my mother has also struggled with the old familiar ache of hopelessness. I can still remember when she started taking medicine for it for the first time… it was like the stifling cage of the bell jar had been lifted and maybe I wouldn’t suffocate under its pressure. It was a freeing experience for my whole family.

I can sum up the men in my family in three words: sexist, stoic, and silent.

I think at some point my parents began to recognize that I was a very emotional child and they both in their respective ways tried to teach me to not be so. And for most of my life it worked – that is, until I married Clint.

Clint has a wonderful gift. He has the amazing ability to cut directly to the heart of things. He can be standing in the swirling madness of my fury and somehow with shocking precision he manages to put his finger directly in the eye of the tempest – and with surprising regularity. All of the bullshit I had managed to conjure up to keep everyone out of the innermost places of my mind and soul, he has managed to dispel with softness, kind words and patience. In a really cool way he’s actually taught me more about how to be a woman, or maybe it’s just in his way he’s given me the freedom to poke around at the idea of being a woman. In a lot of ways he has given me the keys to myself, to be who I really am.

And yet, somehow, the weight of freedom has taken its toll. In the subsequent deluge of emotion that has flooded our marriage, we have struggled greatly. I have mostly died on every one of my own hills, caring not for the manner in which I obtained so-called victory, but only for the shreds of pride I could grasp at the end of the day telling myself that I was strong, and caring not for all the ways I had truly harmed Clint with my belligerent fear. To feel is so very beautiful, but to feel so much is…terrifying. It would seem that every day I am actively working to sabotage what I have gained because mostly it is too much for me to bear.

Which brings me to where I started: that so many women are completely overwhelmed by all the things that they feel, whether it be guilt, shame, anger, bitterness, sadness, or hopelessness. What is going on in the dynamic that allows two people to share the exact same experiences and yet the women seem so much more burdened by them? Is it honesty? Is it harder for women to lie to themselves? Do they feel things differently because of our sex? Or is there some disparity in the man/women relationship that causes this gap? I have known many men that feel deeply and are married to wives who end up feeling just as desperate as those who are married to men who seemingly feel nothing. Sometimes I wonder if being a woman isn’t like being a broken pot continually being filled and continually running dry from so much water.

Or maybe that’s just to be human.