THEN AND NOW

                                                            

 As is so often the case, people from my generation make comparisons between how it used to be and how it is now. This is a gesture to match or equate life between then and now that is both unfair and disingenuous. Our world and we have evolved into a far different society than the one we used to know and love. So many things that we now deem essential to our well being didn’t exist back then, but do now, and have to be dealt with. They are here; front and center, and they are real.

I think back to my mother and how she went most of her life without a clothes dryer, and hung her wash outside in the winter to freeze dry them and then bringing them inside to finish on a wooden clothes rack. If she made a cake it took two hours to assemble all of the ingredients and a miracle to bake it in her antique stove.  She baked her own bread spending countless hours kneading and making the dough. She arose in the morning to a cold kitchen and had to make a fire in the stove before the days activities began. She had a huge garden she took care of in the summer and fruit and vegetables that all had to prepared and canned. It is easy to say to today’s women, ‘you don’t know how good you have it’--- but wait for the rest of the story.

Mom never worked outside the home a day in her life. She never had to take kids to soccer or hockey, and she had eight of them. She didn’t have to take time each morning to be perfectly coiffured and dressed. She had no computer, no I pod, no cell phone to take care of. She went grocery shopping once a month for a few staples and dad would take her. She had no car of her own.  Her job was to keep the house in order and be a good mom and wife and she excelled at it but that was ok back then and now it seems it is not. We lived in a small town and very few women worked outside of the home. If she had known about the glass ceiling she would have been content to live under it, because she had no interest in what was on the other side of it.

It isn’t just times that change, but people change along with them. There is a lot more pressure to succeed and to develop into something you may, or may not even want to be. It’s to bad, that to often, there is also a stigma that goes with those who are content not to run with the pack. An almost socially acceptable perception that these people are lazy, and unwilling to make an effort to wring every little bit of creative talent out of their minds, when in essence they are just reasonably happy and satisfied with how they are.

There are many people who have made it all the way to the top, only to give it all up and return to a simpler life. I have known some of them and always they seemed much happier. Maybe they felt they no longer had anything to prove. Sometimes positions of authority can turn you into someone you don’t want to be, Maybe they found they were in a place that was not so nice, or not what they had envisioned, and maybe they went back to their roots because it was just more comfortable there.