It happened suddenly that in front of some strangers and without coming to mind my father became sentimental, and said, “that’s how it was, I had to act like father and mother.” The visitor stared at him like someone who has before them the hero of the melodrama, and I was fixed on that tense smile of someone who does not share what they hear and expects that annoying moment to pass as soon as possible.
Children often express their truth with loud silence. Because no, my father was never a mother, at least what his generation understood as mother, that woman who filled the house with her presence, who cared for, who watched the intimate cycles of her daughters, watched their wanderings, waited for them to You will arrive, he supervised, he forgave. More than self-denial, it was an assumed and obligated role. But my father had the habit of claiming himself because he was vain and cunning, and he suspected that the lively man who was shepherding (the verb is his) four children had been very big. Life is nourished by pending conversations, and in one of those that we never had I would tell him that I never expected the warmth of a nest from him, however, I learned some things that have helped me a lot: a certain adventurous spirit, an indefatigable curiosity about strangers and the ability to make friends wherever you go.
I have kept his father figure very much in mind by reading Gloria Steinem’s memoir, My life on the road (Alpha Decay), which shows a restless spirit undoubtedly inherited from a happy and uprooted father. Leo Steinem, traveler and traveler, traded in small-time antiques. With the optimism of fools, he always thought he had found the key to success, but he never made a fortune, he had no fixed address, he forced his wife and daughters to constantly wander the American highways, involuntarily granting them a knowledge of the country that years later it would serve the young Gloria to combine writing and activism.
From the age of six, the girl learned to wrap the trinkets that her father sold, to enter the roadside shops to bundle up the clerk and take something extra. That lovely couple of Paper moon, in which Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, father and daughter in reality and fiction, travel perpetrating scams of chichinabo to survive. Steinem confirmed my suspicion: she sees herself as that stubborn girl from Bogdanovich’s movie.
The parents of the one who would be a universal feminist reference separated when she was ten years old. Her mother, a woman with a brittle temperament, could no longer bear that constant nomadism and retreated into her inner world, cared for by her daughters at times and at other times admitted to a psychiatric hospital, never enjoying a circle of friends other than her. protect. The father, on the other hand, died on the road, rich in friends, poor in possessions, ready to adventure until the last breath, prone to the hedonism of the poor: ice cream, shared drinks, the open horizon. The most valuable thing in history is that Gloria Steinem, a relentless feminist, does not judge them. It does not distribute the expected roles of victim and culprit. Quite the contrary, she affirms that since she was a child she wondered how two such opposite people decided to join in marriage.
I confess that I am glad that someone of Steinem’s relevance is so equable when describing the strange couple that his parents formed, and recognizing that a life like his, devoted to activism, is born from that paternal propensity for action , to life on wheels. He admits that he owes his father more in that regard, even though he loves them both equally.
There are many books on motherhood these days. In my opinion, they emphasize the physiological aspect of the event too much, as if the most important thing was the physical tear that undoubtedly occurs. A kind of melodrama has been created around the fact of being a mother, which is also reduced to the biological facts of the first years: childbirth, breast, attachment, sleepless nights, when motherhood is a long journey. This proliferation of mothers’ stories has blurred the father, those fathers who, even clumsily exercising their trade, were essential in our future independence. How many times is machismo cured with the desire for their daughters to shine. That’s what Gloria Steinem thinks.
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