Dancing Outside the Box: Coloring Outside the Lines

DANCING OUTSIDE THE BOX

Coloring Outside the Lines

Copyright © 2013 Beth Valentine.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1748-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1749-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922487

iUniverse rev. date: 12/17/2013

For Joy

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

CONTENTS

Book One

1.   Freudian Slips

2.   Gender Identity

3.   Gender Fluidity

4.   School Days

5.   Accepting Blame

6.   Suppressing the Female Sex

7.   Fear

8.   Sexual Confusion

9.   Girls and Analytical Thinking

10.   A Harvard Professor’s Research

11.   Girls and Their Different Voice

12.   Adolescent Girls and Math

13.   Sexual Rescue, Sort Of

14.   The Good Old Days

15.   Dreams and Schemes

16.   Marriage

17.   A Light Is Switched On

18.   Sexual Misfit

19.   My Second Marriage

20.   Celibacy

21.   Temptation

Book Two

1.   Your Friendly Brain

2.   Your Buddy, the Body

3.   Our Bodies, Ourselves

4.   The Great Awakening

5.   Vision

6.   "To Thine Own Self Be True

7.   Suicide by Cancer

8.   Nan’s Death

9.   Love and Pain

10.   Breast Cancer

11.   Remembrance of Plagues Past

12.   Yellow Fever

13.   Smallpox

14.   Cancer, Our Current Plague

15.   An Assault on the Heart

16.   My Heart Attack

17.   Genes: How Powerful Are They?

18.   Our Unexamined Bodies

19.   Color

20.   Blue

21.   Green

22.   Red

23.   Our Kidneys

24.   Universal Justice

Book Three

1.   We Create the Gods

2.   The Garden of Eden

3.   The Biblical Lot

4.   Fear of Women

5.   Maternal Power

6.   Egos

7.   Guilt

8.   Mind at Work?

9.   Marital ESP

10.   Abandoning the Rational

11.   Mental Telepathy

12.   Craziness

13.   More Craziness

14.   A Dream Alert

15.   A Weird New World

16.   Knowing the Future

17.   The Conscious Mind

18.   Out of Body

19.   Spirits

20.   A Unique Experience

21.   The Vanishing Physical World

22.   Reincarnation

23.   The Universe that Isn’t

Book One

Sex

And Its Ramifications

Freudian Slips

Footnotes to Freud’s penis envy and castration complex theories.

In Freud’s Penis Envy theory young girls envy their brothers’ penises and wish they had such an appendage themselves. In his Castration Complex, young boys fear being castrated by their fathers due to their Oedipus Complex, ie, their desire to have sex with their mothers. These theories were published by Freud in the last years of the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th Century, a time when Victorian repression still dominated life in the United States and in much of Europe.

My mother, born in 1902, grew up in a typical Victorian household. The only naked body she saw growing up was her own. After hearing rumors from her friends that the male body was somehow different, at the age of fifteen, when her parents were out of the house, she climbed on a chair before the bookcase in their bedroom and took down a medical book.

In it she found a sketch of the naked male body and fainted dead away.

It is hard to see how she could have suffered from penis envy as a child. Surely before girls feel this envy, they need to know that males have penises. My mother’s experience clearly indicates that not all girls back then when Freud was writing knew enough to feel deprived.

As was typical of the time, my mother was not informed that she would one day start bleeding each month. She heard about it from friends whose periods had already started so she wasn’t too frightened when she started bleeding but neither she nor her friends had the least idea what the menstrual cycle was all about.

My husband Stephen was born in 1915. His parents were both born in Europe and came to the United States as young adults, bringing their Victorian beliefs with them. Like my mother, Stephen grew up in a home that was not open to sharing anatomical knowledge. He had an older sister and somehow knew girls and women were built differently but had no idea what the difference was.

According to his adult recollection, he spent his childhood trying somehow to get a glimpse of what his mother looked like between her legs. She wore full skirts, ankle length, and as a small boy he tried to crawl in under her skirt when she wasn’t looking to get a peek. Unfortunately he failed every time he tried.

As he grew older he had a better idea. His family lived on a farm with an outhouse. At the age of nine he began digging a hole behind the outhouse, hoping to tunnel in under the outhouse seat so he could spy on his mother when she lowered her underclothes to sit.

His father caught him digging and put an immediate stop to his plan.

A few years later his older brother, who by then was chasing and fondling girls, generously shared some information with him on how girls were formed.

It’s hard to believe that during his years of complete ignorance of female anatomy he was worried that his father would cut off his penis to punish him. As far as he knew, his mother had a penis too or something similar.

It’s also hard to believe that the young boys and girls of Austria during those prudish years when Freud was formulating his complexes had a sophisticated understanding of anatomy and sexuality despite the fact that their parents answered any sex questions evasively or not at all.

Freud had a patient named Hans who at the age of three and a half saw his baby sister naked. He saw she had no penis and concluded that it would grow and become visible when she was older. Freud concluded that poor little Hans was deliberately avoiding the truth—that half the members of the human race don’t have penises—rather than deciding that Hans’ guess wasn’t that illogical.

This incident clearly tells us that Hans had never seen his mother or any other female in the nude prior to seeing his baby sister naked. He assumed—just as my mother had assumed—that every human being was built pretty much the way he was. That is an uninformed but not an irrational assumption.

Freud then decides that this uninformed little boy growing up in a prudish household in which adult nudity is not allowed even before very young children, will harbor a fear that his father will whack off his penis due to his desire to have sex with his mother.

Freud believed the castration complex came to life in little boys between the ages of three and five. In deciding this he is injecting into an uninformed, unsophisticated little boy an incredible sophistication while completely ignoring the crucial work the child is actually engaged in doing.

Rejecting the way she had been raised, my mother did her best to expose her children to anatomical knowledge when we were still so young we would accept it as we accepted all the new knowledge pouring in.

I raised my two sons the same way. They could toddle in to watch their father bathe or to watch me bathe. No need to check out a medical book or to try to tunnel in under an outhouse. Daddy was built one way, Mommy another. They were both built like Daddy and knew they were boys and I was a girl. Nothing about this seemed to disturb them.

When one of my sons was about three, one evening when I had lifted him out of the tub and was reaching for a towel to dry him, I turned back to see him attempting to push his penis back between his legs, peering down at himself as he did this. Apparently he wanted to see how he would look if he were built like me instead of like his father.

As I started to dry him he let go of his penis and smiled at me. I sensed no strong emotion of any kind.

My sister Nan told me about something that had happened when her oldest son Johnny was six years old. Her husband Arthur had left the house at three in the morning to go deep sea fishing. She woke up about an hour later to find her son asleep on Arthur’s side of the bed. She shrugged it off and settled down to go back to sleep.

Sometime later something happened that took her completely by surprise. Her son suddenly shot up in bed and cried out, I’ll go get a knife and cut it off. Then he dropped back down and went back to sleep.

In the morning her son insisted on staying at her side, which was totally unlike him. This was a Saturday but he told his mother he loved her too much to go out to play. He insisted that he loved her too much to be parted from her ever. He wanted to be with her allllllll day.

Nan and I both laughed. It was clear to both of us that her son had decided to keep his penis and this frightened him a little. He loved and needed his mother far more than he loved or needed his abusive father. He had to make her see how much he loved her so she wouldn’t be angry at him for deciding not to castrate himself, to continue being a boy and not join her team.

Nan’s story made it clear there are other ways to explain a young boy’s castration fantasies/fears that have little to do with the Oedipus Complex or fear of the father and everything to do with forging a gender identity.

Johnny at six had the advantage of being fully aware of the structural difference between his parents as he decided who he was going to be. Little Hans at three and a half wasn’t aware of this difference and at six was probably still not aware. However, there were many other differences between his parents that he would have been fully aware of and he would surely have been told numerous times that he was a boy who would one day be a man, crucial information as he settled on an identity.

Gender Identity

How I sliced, diced and cobbled together a workable gender identity.

The pivotal event of my life happened when I was ten months old. My mother told me about it when I was in my late twenties but I was in my mid-forties before I was emotionally ready to tie all the loose ends together.

When I was an infant we lived close to the high school where my father taught. One afternoon he came home early and demanded immediate sex. My mother protested that I was there. He countered that I wasn’t watching. He then slapped her, pushed her down and raped her.

I was terrified. My parents were at war and I had to take sides or I would lose them both. But I couldn’t take sides. Both of them had bathed me in love from the moment of my birth. I needed my mother more but I could not—would not—accept the role of victim. But neither could I identify with the aggressor. So, like a deer caught in the headlights, emotionally I froze.

By the time I was three or four years old, I had thawed and made my choices. I know this had happened because of a story about me my mother loved to tell.

One morning when I was three or four, I stepped out onto the front porch wearing coveralls. A man approached on the sidewalk. Seeing me, he called out, Hello, little boy.

I am not a boy, I called back. I’m a girl.

Little girls don’t wear coveralls, he informed me.

This girl does, I informed him.

I would be a girl but I would make my own rules.

Gender Fluidity

Girl becomes boy; boy becomes girl.

At the age of eight I was still so naïve I not only believed that switching genders was easy, I was sure it had been accomplished by a relative I knew.

Just before I turned eight in 1933, the depression and a stupid choice made by my father dropped our family into homelessness. My brother Paul was six, old enough to start school but by state law he didn’t have to start until he was seven. My younger sister Sue was still too young for school. So Sue and Paul would stay with our parents, who planned to rent motel rooms every night as they travelled around the area while Daddy tried to sell books. Nan and I would be taken south to Los Angeles to stay with relatives.

A few years before, when I was five, Daddy had been fired from his teaching job after a boy on the baseball team he coached claimed my father had punched him and knocked him down. Daddy said he was innocent and Mama believed him. He took a job selling encyclopedia sets door to door and did well. T hen, despite the deep depression the economy was mired in, he joined with some other salesmen to launch a new company selling books. His territory was Fresno so we left San Francisco and moved there and within a few months we were homeless.

Our maternal grandmother had died giving birth to our mother. Our grandfather took his tiny premature baby to his sister Lillian to raise. We kids called our stand-in grandmother Aunt Lily.

Aunt Lily had three children of her own, cousins of our mother we had known all our lives, two girls and one boy. Mama was raised with these three and they were like siblings to her.

When Nan and I were left with Aunt Lily and her husband William, two of their three children still lived at home. Their oldest child Lillian worked as a nurse, supporting herself and her parents. She never married and lived with her parents until each one died.

The younger girl, Shirley, attended UCLA—the University of California at Los Angeles—but was home in the evenings and weekends.

Cold, forbidding Aunt Lily had very little to do with our care while her cold, silent daughter Lillian oversaw everything. She gave us our baths, washed our hair, told us which clothes to wear, made our lunches and watched us walk away down the sidewalk on our way to school.

We lived in a different atmosphere than we’d ever lived in before but we had each other, we had school and above all we had books.

On the bookshelf there was a complete set of the Oz books. We were given permission to read them and we both devoured them as fast as we could. For the first time in my brief reading life, I fell in love with a fictional character, Princess Ozma of Oz, the heroine of the third book.

Fast forward thirty some years. My sister Nan owned a complete set of the Oz books and loaned them to my younger son Anthony, who gobbled them up.

I was curious as to why I’d been so crazy about Princess Ozma so I mentioned to Anthony that I thought I’d reread the third book. Anthony—thank God for Her favors—insisted that I couldn’t read book three without first rereading books one and two. I gave in to his orders and suffered through the first two books.

Almost everyone in America is familiar with the story told in the first book: Dorothy’s trip to Oz, her three companions, her trials, her eventual victory and safe trip home.

Book two told the story of a boy named Tip and I found it so deadly boring I almost quit reading but something kept me going to the end when—surprise, surprise!—Tip suddenly emerges in his/her true identity as Princess Ozma.

A girl who becomes a boy for a time and then goes back to being a girl!

I was thrilled and fell in love. Imagine being able to go from one sex to another! I loved my mother but I’d grown up in a house in which there was frequent discord and poor Mama was always the victim. My father was irritable, unpleasant and occasionally violent. Whenever he was home he fought with Nan or Mama.

I could not identify with being a victim but neither could I identify with being mean and physically aggressive. So what was left?

Gender change. Gender fluidity. Tip/Ozma showed we did not belong exclusively to one sex. We housed both sexes