Ok, ok, ok ... this is kind of a crooked way to start off this discussion. I admit that.I learned this manoeuvre from my mother, of course. It's one thing, when you're a little kid, to have an adult discipline you outright. But it can be a lot worse, I think, to have an adult you love NOT discipline you when you thought that that was what was coming, to have her instead just turn away quietly with that one devastating line: "skdadl, I am so ... disappointed in you."
Och, the guilt. The life-long guilt. But a clever move, eh? 
I swear that I did not start out reacting that way to the men who employed me or the men who romanced me in the 1960s because I thought it was clever. I remembered, verrrrry slowly, that it was a good fall-back position, but in the first instance the genuine disappointment just hit me in the face and the guts as though someone had slugged me, or slammed a door against me.
I think that this feeling is something that we have hardly discussed among ourselves all these years. Women of my cohort (I was born in 1945) faced brutally open and vulgar discrimination at school and at work well into adulthood, so we have mostly talked about that, about what was done to us, about our frustration in asserting our full competence, our full equality, our full humanity.
But there was a further, more subversive subtext. All my life, whenever I have found myself face to face with sudden blind prejudice, even when it has been blocking my path and even as I felt sorry for myself for being unfairly blocked, there has always been a bit of my mind that has been thinking: "Gosh, but this is ... disappointing."
To me, that is the real slam. That boss or that guru I thought I admired ... this guy I thought was so attractive ... but hell. The sudden realization: he doesn't believe in me. He doesn't believe a woman can be what he is, do what he does ... So many times that realization has hit me, and it has taken my breath away every time, has left me feeling that something just ... died.
Because it is too disappointing. Of course it hurts to be "misunderestimated" when you know that's happening for reasons beyond your control, by reason of stereotyping. But the worse hurt is knowing that you have spent your talents, your focus, and/or your love on people who could not even recognize them, much less deserve them.
The saddest thing of all is to realize suddenly that you can no longer love someone you thought you loved.
It is such a ... dead ... feeling.
When I was a young woman, I had that feeling ... too often. I had it about colleagues, bosses, teachers, and lovers. I guess it hit me so often because I kept bouncing back every time. I was such an enthusiast for my studies, my work, and for life. I was such ... an idiot. 
I don't mean to write triumphally here. As my life played out, I found a man who didn't disappoint me and with whom I could negotiate live and adult.
But I've never lost the nervousness of someone who learned young that she could at any moment be viewed as a piece of red meat, however many books she had read, whatever good works she had done.
And I have never lost the corresponding arrogance of a woman who reacts to that reality by knowing that it disappoints, that that world is just plain not good enough for me. That arrogance has become the only weapon I have in a world that has changed a bit, perhaps, although not all that much.
Real world! Accept me for what I am! Otherwise, I warn you: I will be disappointed in you. Like, severely disappointed.
Email this thread to someone!
posted 28 June 2005 02:08 PM
