A Man’s Home is NOT his castle

And Other Patriarchal Myths

An image from my journal, I never expected you to see.

This week, I really struggled. It must have been that stupid prayer about being willing to feel whatever was holding me back.

I’d almost rather die than drop into helplessness. In the nesting baskets of negative emotions, anger is my happy place, right on the surface. Below that is fear. I can go there, but I pop back to anger at the slightest opportunity like the bobber on a fishing line. If circumstances force me to drop to the basket below fear, I fall into despair. It’s horrible, but I’ve been there enough to know that things can turn around if I hold my breath long enough. The bottom basket holds helplessness. The weave of this basket has rotted away because it rests in the water table of helplessness under the whole United States, which is polluted. I’d do just about anything to stay out of there.

But I fell in.

I used to be the dissociation champ. I could pop out of my body at a moment’s notice. For the first 50 years or so, I followed my body around like a helium balloon attached by the slimmest of filaments. I watched what happened, commented mentally on conversations, and when it was my turn to speak, I decided whether my thoughts were fit for human consumption or not. If they passed muster, I’d send an electrical impulse down the filament, and what I thought came out of the mouth.

When I gave birth to my son 27 years ago, I spent the hours of labor floating in the upper right corner of the ceiling, watching that poor woman struggle. This is instructive because dissociation didn’t save me from feeling anything physical. It’s not like you can refuse to feel hours of contractions. It just meant I spent the whole time in helplessness, reliving my trauma when I needed to be strong more than at any other time in my life. And I couldn’t do it. So, trauma on top of trauma and postpartum depression, too.

Which brings me to the Castle Doctrine and the correlation between domestic violence and the fascination with authroitarians. The more oppressively patriarchal a culture is, the more likely they are to flirt with a strong daddy dictator. In Russia, for example, women have been labeled foreign agents and endured smear campaigns and death threats for trying to open shelters. A temporary haven for battered women? Daddy will have none of that.

But a violent daddy in charge is a perversion, or rather an inversion of traditional power dynamics in the home. Did you know that husband is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning bonded to the house, and therefore the woman who owned it? Property rights were matrilineal, and marriages were matrilocal, meaning the husband joined his wife’s family. A bridegroom was a servant of the woman and the land until he displeased her or bored her in bed. Then she divorced him by standing in the doorway with her back turned, preventing his access to her house for three consecutive days. Done. All three Abrahamic mythologies inverted traditionally matrilineal and matrilocal cultures. Sometimes, I don’t know what people mean when they prattle on about traditional values.

In the U.S., our domestic violence problem has caused us to disassociate. We are not centered in our animal bodies, so we make terrible decisions or become incapable of taking decisive action. Both responses are destructive to freedom. Our trauma causes shock waves to pass through the collective culture without resistance, as if this were normal. We either aren’t doing anything to stop the authoritarian takeover when we have minutes left, or we are cheering it on in a gloaty sort of way.

When I write about this now, my eyes spark pinwheels because I’m not supposed to talk about this, and I’m absolutely certain you don’t want to hear it.

My family had meetings where we all agreed that what happens in the family isn’t discussed. Ever. This is funny because the police were at the door regularly. When it got really bad, the neighbors had no choice. They didn’t get involved unless it sounded like someone might die. I imagine they all looked at each other and decided whose turn it was. What’s funny is I never noticed any incongruity while steadfastly keeping our family secrets.

When I was a little girl, the last thing I wanted to hear was my father telling my mother, “Shut up.” If she responded by singing “Just you wait, Henry Higgins” from My Fair Lady, we were going straight to the dogs. I can still sing all the lyrics to that song in Cockney; it lives in my audio cortex. When my father answered with his own Britishism, “A man’s home is his castle,” it was a threat, an allusion to Henry 8th, the king of domestic violence. Can you believe some historians still seriously discuss whether or not Ann Boleyn was guilty? That’s like my maternal grandmother asking Mom what she said to cause my father to break her arm. But he was right about the Castle Doctrine, and we all knew it. We belonged to him.

When the police came, they were embarrassed because they didn’t want to see my dad like that. Believe me. No one did. We lived in a tiny town. All the cops were friends with my dad. They kept their boats at our dock. In any case, there was nothing they could do unless my mother signed a complaint, and everyone knew that she would never. Where would she go once he was released? With what money? She had four kids without access to a credit card or bank accounts unless my dad signed, which would spoil her plot. Mostly, the cops never even came in. They couldn’t. They’d clear their throats, look down and to the side, and swallow hard. They’d ask him to go to bed through the glass door. Everyone, even the police, was helpless.

This week, I got to experience this trauma in my body. Yay for healing, right?

After thirty years of learning to be in my body, of walking in nature with the mantra: I’m willing to feel this, I’d forgotten how to dissociate. I can’t do it anymore.

My dentist was 30 minutes late getting started, removing a failed implant from my jawbone. That whole waiting time, I breathed through my open heart in the willingness to be in my body. He rushed it a little and didn’t wait long enough for the anesthetic to take full effect. Plus, I’d been mindlessly telling the story all week about how terrified I was about having a metal post, anchored in my bone for the last 12 years, yanked out. So, a perfect storm. Oh, and there was that prayer.

Ordinarily, I’d pop out to the ceiling at that time like that. I’d pump be nice signals down the filament like it was an IV, to ensure that the man in authority didn’t get angry with me. Except I couldn’t. His first tug on the implant sent electric shocks into the bone. I jumped out of the chair. That’s not very nice. I was stuck in full-body trauma, in an experience that was way bigger for me than the situation. Way bigger. That’s a sure sign I am in flashback. And I couldn’t get out. I sat back down in the chair and opened my tender mouth to him, waves of terror screaming in all my cells, especially the ones around my eyes. You’d think it was the electric chair.

The dentist tried to be reasonable, though he could see he had a live one. He kept giving me more shots, telling me to relax and close my eyes. If all his fingers weren’t in my mouth I would have told him to fucking relax. Sigh. One feeble attempt to find the anger basket. I tumbled like a salmon to the bottom of the dam. Poor dentist. I could tell he was wondering how to suggest we stop and finish it another day, but that was impossible. My body needed him to clean the infection and suture the wound. Stopping wasn’t an option. When it was finally over, and I’d made the follow-up appointment, he came to ask if I was okay, and I apologized. “I’ve had many procedures done over the years,” I said, “but that’s never happened to me before.” I stumbled to my car and sobbed for 10 minutes before I could drive. The hangover from trauma and too much anesthesia lasted the whole next day.

Here’s my takeaway. America has a crazy daddy problem. The experience of living in the United States right now reminds me of being a little girl in a house where patriarchal violence is the norm. Daddy is out of control, and the authorities are afraid of him, too. Remember when Tucker Carlson promised us, “Daddy’s home, and he’s angry?” We are living in the House that Shame Built. According to AI, who is probably not hallucinating this time, one in four children aged 14-17 in the United States has witnessed domestic violence in the past year, and 50% of domestic violence goes unreported.

The left is ashamed of the cruelty and the fact that no one is standing up to him. The right gloats until it affects them personally. “Please, sir, I voted for you three times…” Watching someone else suffer violence while you are safe is a vicarious thrill, a fascination with death, certainly not a cause for compassion because they deserve it. I can remember telling my mother that maybe she should just shut up.

Congresspeople, senators, huge law firms, and media companies look to the side, swallow hard, and comply. Perhaps they tell themselves it will all be better in the morning when everyone is sober, when the midterms come, once Social Security dies and people really get angry, or whatever. But even if there’s a blue wave, the FEC Commissioner will still be a suck-up committing extortion. Someone I spoke to this week called that waiting and hoping “wishcasting.” They weren’t wrong. People drunk with power don’t sober up. Ever. They’ll drink again before the drug is even filtered out of their blood. Shock and awe, people. Shock and awe.

As a culture, a family if you will, we have to stand up now and make him STOP.

When I was a girl, laws had to be changed, and they were. Too late for my mom, but still. What he’s doing is illegal and unconstitutional. Everyone knows it. Even his supporters know it. To Republican senators and congresspeople, I say: Band together. You have to. The safety in numbers thing is true. To law and media firms, I know he is squeezing you on mergers, acquisitions, and regulations, using the government against you. He can hurt you in lots of ways. But please, don’t settle out of court, especially if your case is good. These are mostly meritless slap suits.

We have to come out of cheering for cruelty on one side and helplessness on the other. We have to come out of our collective trauma.

Please comment. I’d love to know what you think.