Counter-Currents
110 words
She finds herself all by herself in bed,
a web of sunshine on the downy sheet,
a wedding day of bells inside her head,
a layer of cream upon her skin, her feet
still sore from twenty years of love and toil,
yet she thinks that life’s been pretty good.
She hears the bacon sizzle, coffee boil
inside the dented pot of spinsterhood.
She has survived the cold and loneliness
of her decisions, and of her mistakes,
proud of her three degrees, no less
than of her freedom. And yet something rakes
her heart inside and leaves her all a mess
and only she herself knows how it aches.
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6 comments
I like this one.
A very tragic theme delivered with a lot of oomph…and the photo is quite suitable.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with spinsterhood, so long as the spinster has a meaningful career and activities. Single women are not like single heterosexual men; they can have a happy and fulfilled life. I know more than a few in that category. Men, however, just eventually turn strange if they are not shacked up or married. As I was reading somewhere, traditional societies knew this, that women just “are”; men need more in order to be happy. Initiation and marriage. As to homosexual men, I can’t say. They are a separate category.
It appears that men like to delude themselves that all those spinsters out there are dying for a man. No, they are not.
PS. I am married, with children.
No one cares whether spinsters are happy. What matters is that our women give birth to as many white babies as possible and serve us beer on demand.
I actually do care about spinsters. The best teachers I had in elementary school were spinsters. They were tough and did not let anyone get away with lies or deceit. Perhaps they could not have children. I remember writing out lines and lines about how each word in a sentence was related to other words and the whole of the sentence in order to contain the meaning. They don’t do that now. In fact I had to teach it to my children.
Don’t you think you are old enough to get your own beer?
Re “as many white babies as possible”.
Not all women are capable of having lots of children. Having a baby removes lots of nutrients from the body even when a reasonable diet is consumed. Women who have too many kids from a purely physical standpoint go nuts and it’s nothing to do with being busy all day looking after them. It is due to the depletion of nutrients needed to keep sane, i.e. nourish the brain.
Remember the woman in Texas (white woman) who drowned all her kids after having 5 of them one after the other? She suffered from postpartum psychosis from having more kids than her body could handle. We are all different. Yes, a long time ago, women were tougher and had 10 kids, but that does not mean it was a good thing for all of them. Some of them just collapsed and died. So, you watch where your sperm goes, okay?
@Rhondda. Thanks for your comments. I have found that spinster teachers were particularly thorough and demanding, too.
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