Autonomy
Autonomy is the freedom to make your own decisions, the right to self-govern.
Autonomy is lost when the governed submits to being dominated by others.
Back in May of this year I declared to my wife that I wished to be autonomous, to end her dominance over me. How it came to be that I had submitted to her dominance is a long story but I did. One could easily argue that I submitted on the day of our marriage nearly 36 years ago. To become married to the person who is my wife is to submit to her dominance. She's just that kind of person. Or at least, looking at it now from the perspective of 36 years of marriage, that's how it appears to me.
It's odd that I should be saying this. She was even then a "Christian" schooled in the Bible even to the point where she felt it necessary to vow to "obey" during our wedding ceremony. Obey me, I would presume she meant?
I never asked for obedience. She volunteered the word. Personally I am inclined to think that the only really significant vow she remembers either one of us making during that ceremony was when I vowed to be faithful to her. So she didn't keep her vow and neither did I.
When I did start cheating on her I discovered there really wasn't much to gain by not being faithful. Long before that, though, she discovered, I'm afraid to admit, that there wasn't much to gain by being obedient. Whatever the situation, my gold wedding band has been at the bottom of Moosehead Lake for a good 15 years now.
We are still legally married. We have been separated since late May of this year (2014) but it's not a legal separation. She left me. I like to think she didn't just leave me, she abandoned me. She left a note that I promptly tore up but she broke communications with me. Not that we communicated well up until then, we didn't. She's the secretive type, the "aloof" control drama type for any Celestine Prophecy fans reading this.
Not only did she leave me, she left her house cluttered with her stuff, she left her dog, and she left her three cats, all to be taken care of by me with hardly a penny of support from her. Not too cool considering I depended on her workaholic income to meet our modest household expenses. I was the house keeper. I was the mechanic who kept her cars running while she tried to beat them into the ground. She doesn't just commute, she works out of her car and drives a good 30,000 miles a year mostly on rough rural Maine roads, treacherous roads in winter and even more treacherous on winter nights when she occasionally gets called out. It has been my job to keep her cars safe on as small a shoestring budget as possible. She likes her money.
She likes her money so much in fact that she never paid me for the work I did. On occasion I would get an allowance of $20.00 a week to cover my own personal needs but that was only on occasion, nothing I could count on. Yes she wrote the check at Goodwill when I needed clothes. Yes it was her income that paid the utility bills. But it was my back that chainsawed and split and piled the wood to keep our heating expenses to a minimum. It was my hands that did house repairs. Should a husband be rewarded for his work when it is the woman who brings home the bacon? OK, should a woman be rewarded for her work when it is the husband that brings home the bacon? Does society have a double standard?
I used the word "abandoned" earlier because I believe she owes me for all the ways I worked to save her hard-earned income. She apparently doesn't agree. I feed the dog and the cat. Two of the cats have already vanished. I feed the surviving 13 pound cat and the 120 pound lab. And I maintain the homestead now.
"So what?", you might ask. Well let's just say it's a bit of a pinch to maintain normal life on minimum Social Security. It hurts.
But I am convinced she wants it to hurt. She wants it to hurt so much, so bad, that I relent, I give in, I bow to her dominance and abandon my desire for autonomy.
This now, I fear, is the new direction of this blog. The past is behind me. War has been declared. The battlefield is right here at home. There will be casualties. There already are casualties. Survival is at stake and I may not survive. I am convinced she wants me in the grave, or the oven, whichever costs the least for the survivors. She does like her money.
Autonomy is lost when the governed submits to being dominated by others.
Back in May of this year I declared to my wife that I wished to be autonomous, to end her dominance over me. How it came to be that I had submitted to her dominance is a long story but I did. One could easily argue that I submitted on the day of our marriage nearly 36 years ago. To become married to the person who is my wife is to submit to her dominance. She's just that kind of person. Or at least, looking at it now from the perspective of 36 years of marriage, that's how it appears to me.
It's odd that I should be saying this. She was even then a "Christian" schooled in the Bible even to the point where she felt it necessary to vow to "obey" during our wedding ceremony. Obey me, I would presume she meant?
I never asked for obedience. She volunteered the word. Personally I am inclined to think that the only really significant vow she remembers either one of us making during that ceremony was when I vowed to be faithful to her. So she didn't keep her vow and neither did I.
When I did start cheating on her I discovered there really wasn't much to gain by not being faithful. Long before that, though, she discovered, I'm afraid to admit, that there wasn't much to gain by being obedient. Whatever the situation, my gold wedding band has been at the bottom of Moosehead Lake for a good 15 years now.
We are still legally married. We have been separated since late May of this year (2014) but it's not a legal separation. She left me. I like to think she didn't just leave me, she abandoned me. She left a note that I promptly tore up but she broke communications with me. Not that we communicated well up until then, we didn't. She's the secretive type, the "aloof" control drama type for any Celestine Prophecy fans reading this.
Not only did she leave me, she left her house cluttered with her stuff, she left her dog, and she left her three cats, all to be taken care of by me with hardly a penny of support from her. Not too cool considering I depended on her workaholic income to meet our modest household expenses. I was the house keeper. I was the mechanic who kept her cars running while she tried to beat them into the ground. She doesn't just commute, she works out of her car and drives a good 30,000 miles a year mostly on rough rural Maine roads, treacherous roads in winter and even more treacherous on winter nights when she occasionally gets called out. It has been my job to keep her cars safe on as small a shoestring budget as possible. She likes her money.
She likes her money so much in fact that she never paid me for the work I did. On occasion I would get an allowance of $20.00 a week to cover my own personal needs but that was only on occasion, nothing I could count on. Yes she wrote the check at Goodwill when I needed clothes. Yes it was her income that paid the utility bills. But it was my back that chainsawed and split and piled the wood to keep our heating expenses to a minimum. It was my hands that did house repairs. Should a husband be rewarded for his work when it is the woman who brings home the bacon? OK, should a woman be rewarded for her work when it is the husband that brings home the bacon? Does society have a double standard?
I used the word "abandoned" earlier because I believe she owes me for all the ways I worked to save her hard-earned income. She apparently doesn't agree. I feed the dog and the cat. Two of the cats have already vanished. I feed the surviving 13 pound cat and the 120 pound lab. And I maintain the homestead now.
"So what?", you might ask. Well let's just say it's a bit of a pinch to maintain normal life on minimum Social Security. It hurts.
But I am convinced she wants it to hurt. She wants it to hurt so much, so bad, that I relent, I give in, I bow to her dominance and abandon my desire for autonomy.
This now, I fear, is the new direction of this blog. The past is behind me. War has been declared. The battlefield is right here at home. There will be casualties. There already are casualties. Survival is at stake and I may not survive. I am convinced she wants me in the grave, or the oven, whichever costs the least for the survivors. She does like her money.
posted by Bill | 8:33 PM
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