Pounding your fist into the abyss
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- August 27, 2023
- 1820
I cried on a recent Sunday afternoon watching “Bridges of Madison County.” Everything hits so different at 54 compared to 26 when I first saw it. Meryl Streep is even more sublime on rewatch.
By the end of the movie, my face was a wet mess, and I sat with myself and tried to figure out why. When I first watched it all those years ago, I saw a lonely housewife. But now I saw a woman who had so much more inside of her than her family could ever see. And it hit me hard that we often do lose some of those dreams.
“I bet you find it boring talking about your life to a housewife in the middle of nowhere,” said Francesca (Streep).
“This is your house; this isn’t nowhere,” the photographer said.
I jotted these lines down in my notes to turn over in my head, and it was like tiny slivers of glass had pierced my heart.
I sat at my old kitchen table with a dear friend. The table needs some work as her surface has become a bit rough and faded. A good sanding and a coat of light stain and varnish are needed. But I don’t want her to look brand new because she’s seen it all — the fights, the tears, my meals that flopped.
My friend and I sipped on steaming mugs, and we pounded our fists on that old table, lamenting how we are perceived as we grow older. We wondered if there was a neon sign only our kids could see that blinked “feeble.”
“There is exactly 10 years between doing everything for them to becoming inept in their eyes,” I said. “How dare they.”
“Sometimes I’m sipping a hot drink and finally relaxing for the evening, and I get a call asking what I’m doing. And I think, ‘I’m sitting here doing absolutely nothing, which is what I want to be doing,’” my friend said.
And we pounded our fists on the table and wondered about that invisible line we’ve somehow passed in their eyes. Then we laughed because we love them.
In the movie Francesca is invisible to her family, except for what she can do for them. Women can get so tied up in the details and needs of others that we become an outline, a shadow, something so ephemeral we disappear unless we pound a fist in defiance of it.
I hear the guffaws and the uh-uh’s saying no, women aren’t invisible. And while you’re able to right now read the words I’m writing, you’re seeing them at a cost. For many, many years I didn’t write at all. I chose to stay at home and become the keeper of the details for my family: every appointment, what papers needed signed, the 1,000s of drop-offs and pickups from soccer, and what underwear needed replacing because of holes. There was no room to write.
For many women, choosing to chase a dream cannot be the choice for raising a family. In our society we must acknowledge a man chasing his dream is more accepted.
Have you ever seen a man asked this question, “Who will care for your children while you work?”
I would venture not.
The freedom to do is lopsided.
So we pound our fists on wooden tables and think about the years that the words and dreams lay dormant. And when we finally reach the age where we are free and ready to fly, that blinking neon light marks us as unable.
But I reject that. I will continue to travel solo, work hard to write passionate and true, and never let the stuff bring me down. As Francesca said in the movie, “I was acting like another woman but was more myself than I’d ever been before.”
Bring her out and let her stay seen where the sunshine shows her glory. And to the ones who break out of the cycle, I see you.
Melissa Herrera is a published author and opinion columnist. She is a curator of vintage mugs and all things spooky, and her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives. For inquiries, to purchase her book or anything else on your mind, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com or find her in the thrift aisles.