“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told.” —Alan Keightley
As a child my parents had very specific ideas as to how I should be including the ever so popular “seen but not heard.” I was a girl growing up in the fifties. I wore hats and gloves to church on Easter Sunday. I learned to cross my legs only at the ankles and to keep my knees together. Girls were expected to take home ec while boys took shop. Boys were expected to pay for everything which girls were to appreciate only by saying, “Thank you.” What the neighbors thought was more important than how you felt. Only shift workers did not sleep the same hours as everyone else. Even in the early sixties girls were not allowed to wear slacks to school except under their dresses on Friday IF there was a football game right after school–and NO ONE wore blue jeans to school and we dressed up to travel if we were going in anything other than the family car.
Now?
I write a blog and other things that strangers read.
The only hats I own are a knit for winter and a rain hat for summer. The only gloves I own are for winter although they are nice leather ones lined with Thinsulate.
I no longer cross my legs at all because my artificial knees make it uncomfortable.
I never did learn to cook or sew but I know even less about mechanical/electrical things.
Dave still pays for everything and I still say, “Thank you.”
It’s still hard for me to identify my feelings, let alone express them.
On a typical night I go to bed somewhere between midnight and 2 am and get up somewhere between 9 am and noon.
I wear blue jeans to everything except weddings and funerals and I wore white jeans to the last wedding I attended. I own one culotte-style skirt–everything else is jeans or sweat pants.
And I go off for the winter in my RV and leave Dave at home.
That last one would drive my mother nuts if she knew about it. After all, what would the neighbors think?!!!
TTYL,
Linda
