ME, as story...

Me, as story? The real story is bits and pieces of me. My life is framed by my experiences and education; and my perspective is formed by a view of me as my family, friends, and community help me to formulate my world cultural and universal truths. I am a work in progress, an ongoing project with ever changing media and data, ever shaping boundaries and definitions, never the same and never ending. My story is the essence of who I am, at this moment in time. I am more than physical matter – static. I am multiple and self-assigned identities interwoven in a quilt of context where the woof thread is my positionality and the weft weaves my identity. This story is my “becoming” (Gullette, 1997, p. 29) -- a narrative of acceptable change as I develop, and age, into a whole human being.

I find my power as my story shapes who I am. On my way to who I am, I discover myself in my relationships with the people in my life. Born in 1954 in Platte, South Dakota to working class parents of English, German, Dutch, Bohemian, and Native American ancestry, my older brother and I had a fairytale family life and childhood. Growing up in a large extended family of more men than women, attending Catholic Church Mass and catechism, accepting and honoring my conservative values, I loved being a girl. I dressed up, pretending to be a mother and a wife and playing with my dolls, while reading extensively in defense of not being able to hear much of the conversation going on around me due to ear problems that were soon resolved with the introduction of the miracle of penicillin. No one ever told me I had to be a wife and a mother, but I certainly knew that this was what I would be as an adult.

The civil rights movement and the second wave of feminism washed over me barely leaving a drop of water on my exterior but soaking into my deep interior being, laying suspended, waiting for an earthquake of tumultuous emotions to break open the fertile ground of my imagination, mind, and soul. When I found myself isolated in an abusive marriage with an abuser who was expert at manipulation and mothering four children -- ages 15, 13, 12, and 10 -- alone in a world of couples, this earthquake occurred. After I severed the relationship, I inadvertently acquiesced to societal expectations. Fighting for survival among multiple postilions of patriarchy, I emerged later as a full-time, post-secondary student at the same time my fourth child was entering his college years. I was barely eking out a substandard, poverty-level living for myself and my children. Finding succor and support from co-workers, friends, and family, I discovered me in a “feminist midlife” (Ray, 1997, p. 181). This period of renewal and growth blossomed on my fortieth birthday. As I began this “. . . long middle of the course of life” (Gullette, 1997, p. 8), I found myself engaged in a verdant paradise of praxis -- deep thought, reflection, and action -- excavating the ruins and remains of my archaic self, so long dormant, overgrown with the tumbleweeds of childbirth and the cacti of childrearing, resting on my arid, desert soul. This renaissance became articulated through my feminist identity as a radical and outspoken individual who was willing to traverse the unknown terrain of assertiveness and honesty. The mandate of being honest was crucial to my sense of agency, requiring honesty at all costs, with self and others, even if such honesty provoked a range of feelings from the agony and pain of revelation to the sweetness of irreverent reverie. Peregrinating a rocky, well-trodden path to enlightenment and autonomy, I became a new me, a self-identified and self-positioned woman, living in an ageist and sexist culture.

My ageist and sexist world did not want to acknowledge the concussion of battering, a lambasting visage of my story. My new honest self would not allow an ambiguous denial of this jolting state of affairs. I am a survivor of domestic violence
(17-year abusive marriage and 14 years free of violence) and also an advocate for other survivors of domestic violence. I have been working in the field of domestic violence for eleven years, starting as volunteer: support group facilitator, hotline advocate, and shelter staff. I was hired into the position of Coordinator of Advocacy and Community Outreach, and now, I am in my current position of Shelter Manager for the YWCA Clark County SafeChoice Domestic Violence Program. My experience includes being trained as a certified sexual assault advocate for community-based programs within the state of Washington as well. This narrative indelibly inscribes my identity in real life blood, sweat, and tears on the atrium of my heart and the negritude of my soul, transgressing earlier adaptations of myself.

Manifesting self during a transitory stage, I metamorphosed into teacher/student. During this time, I read and researched the subject of domestic violence thoroughly and will continue to do so. Over the years, I have attended education and training events and conferences on local, state, and national levels as well as developed curricula and delivered education at training events and conferences on local, state, and national levels. My education had provided a divine influence on my midlife transition to my “real self” (Gullette, 1997, and Class Notes, October 6, 2005), allowing me room to transgress social and cultural cues about who I am at this age. As an Atlanta (Georgia) Semester: Women, Leadership, and Social Change Program student in 2001, I was an intern at the National Center for Human Rights Education where I learned and researched human rights. My work there was to formulate educational materials (Fact Sheets) on the subjects of domestic violence and human rights, racism and human rights, environmental justice and human rights, and disability and human rights, and to research the subjects of and the connection between women, HIV/AIDS, race, and violence against women in South Africa. My college education has been a springboard to self-knowledge making resistance possible. My pursuit of the academic disciplines of gender, culture, and history has inspired my feminist ethics to break the deafening silence of the ascribed “age ideology” (Gullette, 1997, p. 3) that weds cultural discourses, social practices, and gendered expectations of women as we age, as I age. These activities are my source of resistance, a means to transgress my social and cultural expectations as a woman who is fifty-one years old.

Practicing resistance to aging stereotypes, I look for practices that will free me from the encumbered and limited physical world. These limitations are socially constructed boundaries that will exercise control over my life course – if I let them. I refuse to be “. . . too vulnerable and fragile to be [a] participating, contributing community member[s] . . .” (Silvers, 1999, p. 207). To that end, I began volunteering and contributing to social justice movements for marginalized populations. My volunteer duties have included being a member of the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence for seven years and a Board of Directors member for four years, serving on their Executive Committee as Treasurer (year two  - 1999) and Chair Person (year three – 2000). For seven years, I was a volunteer member of the Survivors’ Caucus, a statewide (Washington) organization of domestic violence survivors working to eliminate domestic violence against women, children, and men and a member of their Leadership Council. Since 2001, I have been a Board Member of the Washington State Advisory Committee for the Displaced Homemaker Program.

These qualifications explain my ability to discuss the key concept of women’s issues in aging for this essay. I feel, as the author of this essay, that I am qualified to use my judgment in analyzing data and providing a discussion of relevance to domestic violence, violence against women, and human rights on personal, educational, and professional levels as it relates to women in issues of aging. As I join Gullette, Walker, Ray, and other puissant Critical Feminist Gerontologists in their endeavor of ‘declining to decline,’ I choose a powerfully strategic and significant symbol to illustrate my circuitous loop of life. I choose the butterfly, la mariposa (Spanish), yo yo bawtch (Luushotseed - Native American), vlinder (Dutch), schmetterling (German), farfalla (Italian), la papillon (French), and borboleta (Portuguese). The butterfly is a positive symbol used cross-culturally to represent powers of transformation, spirituality, and immortality; for beauty arising out of death and corruption -- the butterfly is an everlasting symbol, a new beginning after an ending. Indeed, the butterfly is an excellent symbol for the aging process as discussed by the above mentioned scientists, scholars, and activists.

What better way to manifest resistance to current aging theory than using the symbol of the butterfly? What better way to transgress ageist attitudes than using the symbol of the butterfly? We can call my resistance to age theory “The Butterflies’ Manifesto” with the hope of encouraging other women to practice age ideology transgression! While flying free as butterflies, we can demonstrate honor and respect for the right of each woman to govern herself in accordance with her culture, traditions, and lifestyle. We may also recognize the power in and the right of all women to determine their own destiny, no matter their chronological age.

This is me, as story.