Chapter 7: The Right Kind of Pride
THE RIGHT KIND OF PRIDE
BUT there is another kind of pride, one which every man and woman under God ought to cultivate. Isak Dinesen defines it in her beautiful book Out of Africa:
Pride is faith in the idea that God had when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards a happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God’s idea of him. His success is the idea of God, successfully carried through, and he is in love with his destiny.[2]
I have learned (but slowly, I’m afraid), what it is to be in love with my destiny. Your father learned it much earlier. “Wherever you are,” he wrote, “be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.” In my judgment (which I trust is not wholly impaired by my being your mother) you have always known this. You have been, almost from birth, not only accepting but exuberant in your acceptance.
“People who have no pride,” Dinesen goes on, “are not aware of any idea of God in the making of them, and sometimes they make you doubt that there has ever been much of an idea, or else it has been lost, and who shall find it again? They have got to accept as success what others warrant to be so, and to take their happiness, and even their own selves, at the quotation of the day.”[3]
A few women whose vision is grotesquely distorted are trying to redefine for us a woman’s “success” and to tell us that our happiness lies not in the idea of God in the making of us but in obliterating that idea altogether. The creation of male and female as complementary opposites has no place in their thinking, and any definition of masculinity and femininity is totally meaningless except with reference to cultural and social expectation. We may alter masculinity and femininity simply by altering the conditioning processes.
You would understand better than some how greatly cultures and societies differ in their expectations of male and female behavior. For the first eight years of your life you lived with South American Indians who drew sharp distinctions between the sexes. They were not always the distinctions we North Americans would draw, but distinctions nonetheless. Women wore long hair, men wore short. Men ate first, women waited to eat whatever might be left over when the men had finished. Women were the bearers of heavy burdens. Men were not considered physically capable of this work. Both men and women were willing to work for white people, swinging machetes to clear grass and underbrush, and while the women were usually more efficient at this, their wages were lower than the men’s even though the hours were the same. Men hunted, women planted. Men used guns (blowguns or shotguns, depending on how “civilized” they were), women made fishnets, pots, hammocks, sieves. Men wove baskets. You as a little foreign girl took your own place among them, learning to catch fish with your hands as the women did, cooking, mashing, chewing and spitting your manioc in order to make chicha, and then, before you drank yours, serving the little boys who were your friends. You learned to swing a machete and to build fires and to walk the trails with one foot in front of the other, and you also knew that, like the Indian children, you were not expected to complain.
I can’t remember when we first spoke of sex. You grew up knowing about it. When you were hardly out of diapers you helped me to save the life of a baby who was having a hard time being born. It was a breech presentation, and the women had already begun the death wail for both mother and child and refused to help me. I needed a warm cloth to wrap around the baby’s body to help keep it from trying to breathe too soon, but no one wanted to soil the clothes they had. You ran and brought me one of your own diapers and then watched in amazement with the others as the baby was born at last, alive and yelling.
You were only three when we went to live with the Aucas, who were naked people and whose conversation was almost exclusively of hunting, spearing, and sex. There was no choice of vocabulary. The Auca language did not distinguish between a clinical, a nursery, and a gutter vocabulary. There were perfectly straightforward words for organs, functions, and activities, and any everyday conversation might include them, so you learned them, of course. And now you have forgotten all that, along with all the rest of the language you knew, but you remember the people and the life you lived with them there, and for that I am glad.
You always carried your dolls in a carrying cloth as Indian mothers did, and as you yourself had been carried. You played house with the Indian children —something they had never thought of doing, but you showed them how to fix a little place in the hollow of a tree root and build a tiny fire in the middle of it, for, after all, the only really essential item in a house in the jungle was a fire. Were you conforming to social pressures in playing such “girl’s” games? Surely not. Surely it was because you were born a woman. There was in you a knowledge divinely given on which your imagination, more active than the Indians’, went to work.
As you grew older and we came to the States to live, I remember how eagerly you went to school for the first time. You started the fourth grade and in a few days you had caught the rhythm of this new life, so different from the old one, and in what seemed to me a matter of weeks you had grown up. We had talked when you were small about the wonders of being a woman. Once when you were about four you were interviewed on a children’s talk show on the radio.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Valerie?” you were asked (of course!).
“Just want to be a mommie,” was your unhesitating reply.
Growing up was very exciting. You could hardly wait, and when the day came at last when you knew you were a woman indeed, you came to tell me about it and your eyes shone.