 | The sexism of regretposted by Paris Tompkins, Limited AccessThursday, June 17th 2010 @ 9:00 PM  (1 ratings) |
In one of my earlier posts, I said I had some regrets for decisions I’d made in my past. I would like to rescind that today. Last night I was having a conversation with one of my sons who lived through a very traumatic portion of my life with me, and knows first hand of some of my decisions. He spoke of my having regret, but without thinking about how I felt in the past, I said to him, “No, I don’t have any regrets about anything I’ve done.”
He thought my leaving home and relocating to a different state should have been viewed by me as regrettable. The fact that I left my children behind with their father was his most fault-finding reason, but to me I made the decision to leave and it was the best thing I could do for myself at the time. I’m not apologizing for my actions, but perhaps a little explanation is necessary.
I was married at 19 to my first boyfriend, who was a blind date for my senior prom. That should say something about my social and life experience. My parents approved of my now ex-husband, and we were married a year after I graduated from high school. Right away we had two sons, and on the day our second son was born, my husband conceived another son with someone else, in my home, in my bed.
For someone who had a childlike mentality of playing house as a wife, and was still reading fairy tales which all ended in “happily ever-after,” my world was turned completely upside down. Unknown to everyone in my family, I kept my husband’s secret for 13 years, and we had two more children, our daughters.
But after suffering in silence and telling myself for those 13 years that, “One day I will get away,” I did. The mental and emotional abuse of his continuing infidelity became more than overwhelming and I escaped with the first offer of freedom that came along. My family encouraged me to stay and my father told me, “It doesn’t matter if he has 2 or 3 old women lying around. Stay there anyway.”
But taking my father’s example of relocating our family from Louisiana to California years before, I left my family and moved from San Francisco to Atlanta believing I could make an untroubled life for me and my children. My actions, however, were seen as tantamount to heresy because I was a “mother.” My son, family and many others think I should feel regret for doing what I did (although he and his brother would never have been born if I hadn’t.) Why is it that men seldom feel the need to explain or regret? To me it is a classic example of sexism. What are your views?
