Memorial Day: To My Father and My Son ...
How does a woman get this lucky?
As Memorial Day arrives, I find my self thanking my lucky stars both for my father and my son. Let’s start with dad.
The day I knew he would always have my back as a girl and as a woman was the day, when I was nine, that I gathered my bat, a bag of new baseballs, my glove and my hat and started out the front door to go try out for Little League. Daddy was right behind me.
“Hold up, there!” he said. He sat me down on the front porch steps and warned me. “There not going to let you play,” he said flatly. But there was a gentleness in the way he said it that was meant to tell me, “I’m so sorry, little girl.”
“Why not?” I was genuinely surprised because the boys and girls played together all the time—after school, on Saturday mornings, in the cooling, humid air of late summer until it was so dark we couldn’t see the ball to hit it.
“Because you’re a girl.”
“But that makes no sense! We’re friends!”
“But this is different,” he said. “These are tryouts for a real … team.”
“But we play just as well as the boys do!” I protested.
“I know. But they’re not going to let you try out at all. It’s not going to be question of whether you’re better. You’re not going to get to play.”
“I don’t believe it!” I cried. And I honestly didn’t believe it. I honestly didn’t think that if I went down there, they’d turn me away. “I’m going!”
“OK,” he said softly.
I gathered my things and started the half-mile walk down shaded streets in our small Southern town. I felt completely confident that Daddy was just mistaken.
The laughter started as I got near first base on my way to home plate, where the coach, my math teacher, was standing with a group of boys. By the time I got there, the laughs had turned to jeers. The boys’ fathers were openly hostile to my presence there; their mothers were embarrassed for me. And one sneered, “Didn’t your parents tell you anything?” The horrible thing was that the mothers didn’t stand up for me—not one of them.
I argued, vociferously. But when it was clear they weren’t going to recant, I stopped short of begging, though I wanted to really badly. But my math teacher could see the tears welling up in my eyes. And I bet all of them could see my face turn first red, then crimson, then, I’d imagine, that dark black-red color people turn when they’re just dying inside.
So I turned and started home. The boys were laughing, and now they were taunting me with insults.
These were the same boys I had played baseball with a week earlier when we were all just kids. Now we weren’t. They were male, and they would own the world. The world has just been cleaved into, and from that day to this, male and female are separated by an intransigent patriarchal privilege.
When I turned the corner onto our street and looked toward our house, my dad was there, sitting right where I’d left him on the front porch steps. As I approached him, the wall of tears I’d been holding back came rushing out. I fell into his arms and cried and cried.
Eventually, when I was starting to “dry up” (as he used to call it), he tried to talk me out of it, using the age-old male “excuse” for taking everything from women:
“One of these days, you’re going to have children, something a man can never do. And that is worth far more than anything a man can ever do.”
Maybe it was that the glories of motherhood couldn’t quite land for a nine-year-old girl, but I wasn’t sold. And I had a question:
“Why is it,” I asked my father, “that because women can do one thing you can’t, you get to take everything else??????????”
He was stunned. He was absolutely speechless.
“That’s not fair!” I screamed. “Do you think that’s fair????? Do you?????????? Do you???????????????”
And what he said next was so amazing that I will love him for it until the sun burns out.
He said, “No. You’re right. It’s not fair. There’s nothing fair about it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’ll always be getting hurt like this.”
From that day on, he fought for me. He fought for me not to have to hide my intelligence so I’d get dates. He fought for me to go to music school in the summers by myself, against my mother’s wishes.
And he was there when the hammer came down so hard that I’m angry about it to this day.
When I was 16, NASA came to our high school to entice kids to go into the space program. When I got into the portico in front of the library, every other person there was a boy. As I started into the room in the middle of the pack, I was pulled aside by a NASA representative.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, as if I didn’t already know.
“Please just wait until everybody else is in the room.” Then he was joined by two other officers.
“NASA is not taking women at this time,” he said.
“Well, I know that, but couldn’t I just come in and listen? At some time soon, I know they will be, so can’t I just listen?”
“No.”
“What harm can it do?”
“No.”
Now we were back to my eternal question.
“WHY NOT???????????????” I demanded.
“Because you are not physically designed to do this kind of work.”
“How so?” I knew I was painting him into a corner where he’d have to come right out and say it, and I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let him rob me of my greatest dream without his having to come right out and say it."
“Because you get pregnant and …”
“AND?”
He was furious.
“AND?”
Silence.
More silence.
“AND?”
“AND YOU BLEED!”
And then, struggling to recover his dignity, he tried to say something, but I didn’t let him.
“Get out of my sight,” I said, opening the door for him. “Get out of my sight.”
He and the others went inside. But just as I was closing the door, a latecomer arrived. The last person into the room was Frank Culbertson, my friend, who would go on to the Naval Academy, pilot the space shuttle, and chair the committee on the Challenger disaster. I’m glad he got it. It couldn’t be me, not then—but at least he could have it, and I followed his exploits for his entire career with the greatest joy. Way to go, Frank!
When I got home, my father was already there, home early from work. Apparently, he’d been warned that I was volcanically angry!
All I could say was, “And that it’s for my dream for the rest of my life — or until, my guess is, they’ll let women in when I’m already too old to go.”
This time he didn’t hug me. He couldn’t. He was so angry he was shaking.
My father had a smattering of patriarchal insanities, like any man born into this culture in his time. He was deathly afraid one of his daughters would turn up pregnant out of wedlock as it would completely tank his career, shame the family out of all social contact, and ruin his daughters’ lives.
But he had a rage on our behalf where it really mattered. He resisted every attempt of our mother to turn us into cutesy women who could utter the phrase Oh, you’re so strong! without throwing up. He supported my education in every area of interest for me. He taught me meteorology and the principles of powered flight. He taught me the constellations. And when everything got to be too much for me, he took me fishing. And when I witnessed the abuse of a black child by one of my schoolmates and decided to file charges against him, my father went with me to the police station, saw to the boy’s arrest, and stood by me while the whole 92% white racist town came after me with knives. It could have completely destroyed his career, and he did it anyway, because he wouldn’t tell me to stay silent, no matter what it cost him.
My father’s love was the kind that wanted for me whatever it was that I truly wanted for myself. He wanted for me men who would want that for me, too.
He was brilliant, riddled with PTSD, kind and warm and the funniest human being I ever knew.
I will miss you forever.
And then there’s my son.
He sat me down a few months ago and started explaining the Manosphere to me. He admitted having lost deeply esteemed friends to the Incel Movement and warned me that the climate was changing to one of deep threat for me and all other women.
He also warned me against the alignment of the Manosphere with Radical Right politics, which he saw as infused with misogyny.
He’s spectacularly well-educated in an environment chock-full of academics and social activists. His was a house that hosted debates between Alan Watts and John Lilly and welcomed visits from Daniel and Pat Ellsberg and Julian Bond and Dorothy Cotton.
Yet, he’s also spectacularly well self-educated, too, a voracious reader of world histories and current events. He is my favorite philosophical and theoretical debate partner.
And he is, above all, a truly self-made man in that he has thought through the major issues of his time and come out of it a man of extraordinarily clear vision, one who encourages women’s power and self-determination and helps to counsel his fellow men that the power others have doesn’t reduce their own. Or, put another way, it’s not pie. It’s really not.
The support I felt from my father as a child and a young woman is the support I feel from my son now.
So, on this Memorial Day, I salute the warriors who turned out to be the men least afraid of a woman’s freedom and intelligence and power and dreams.
Thank you, Dad.
And thank you, Ari.
I love you both more than I can say.
This deeply moved me. I didn’t have a dad who fought for me but my mom fought the good fight to help me in a similar way. She never served but she riveted planes for Boeing during WW2. It was from her I learned to do household repairs. As you say, I will miss her forever.
I recall when I wasn’t allowed to take drafting in high school in the 1970s. I was a math and science mavin and considered engineering as a possible future career so I wanted to take drafting. I was told I could only get in if all the boys who signed up got a place first and there was room left. There wasn’t.This would change but not in time for me. I was also heavily recruited by the military academies such as West Point because I could be in the second class where they admitted women. Ultimately I didn’t see that as my path and I think for me it was the right choice but I recall thinking that this was a barrier for women I might want to take on. Your father and son sound like people I’d want to know. You’re lucky to have them and clearly you had a big role in forming them as the feminists they showed themselves to be.
I'm going to share this with my daughters and sons! I have tried to support and defend my girls' rights and dreams against this patriarchal society. They never pushed against the standards the way you did as a young baseball player or aspiring astronaut, but the systemic pressure and push to accept patriarchal norms is relentless everywhere in our society. I really appreciate your sharing the memories of the men who defended the best they could, and never waivered in their support even when there was literally nothing they could do to break some of those barriers!