New Leaf
Well-Known Member
I forgot how handsome Brando was. I did not remember the whole of the movie. Just the Stella scene, my friends daughter is named Stella, so you can bet I am always saying "STELLLLA!"So, I watched the Marlon Brando clip posted on P.E.
I am still toasty warm.
So, I told the hubs "Let's see if we can pull up that movie on your new toy (he bought a contraption that hooks into the internet and pulls up millions of movies). He doesn't need any more incentive to be in front of the one eyed monolith. I digress as I sit here in front of my one eyed monolith. Sigh.
Anyhow, So we start to watch it, film noir. It is so dramatic. Stellas' sister Blanch speaks so quickly in her southern drawl that I am needing sub-titles (isn't a drawl supposed to be slow?) So, I go to Cliff notes and start reading about the play, etc. WOW. Dicey stuff for the 50's.
It is all about the things you are speaking of in this post Cedar. Were you recounting the movie, or is this a coincidence? (I am so lost in the translation!)
Yes the passion, ahhhhh, youth.But...I remember that kind of passion. Remember being that young? It was enough just to have it, just to ride that out; there was nothing to compare it to then, and there is nothing like it, now. Then come babies and living and not being the prettiest thing because for children, we must become the most stable thing. It's like voyaging across waters of so many different colors, living a life.
My boy has a girlfriend, and they are just that, such good friends.
Others have told me I shouldn't allow him to be with just the one girl, I see their point, but then again, they are such good friends. Sigh. SO of course I talked too them about passion.....
I like that imagery Cedar, voyaging across waters of so many different colors.
Men are very clever. I think they are truly afraid of us. Afraid of how much they need us. They have to put on this tough front, to prove their manliness.I know what you mean though Leafy, about wishing for more. D H and I are forever falling out of happiness and into hatred. That is, as I make very clear to him, because my D H is a jerk, sometimes. I am serious. D H can be loud and verbally abusive and pretend he doesn't know it when of course, he knows exactly what he is doing.
So they try to break us down, and think we don't know.
I had to learn that the hard way. When I was younger, I would fall for it, that was the "first" wife. Now I have transitioned to the "second" wife. Heh, heh.
I know better than to let him lasso my emotions, (when my defenses are up). Every once in a while he will get to me, and I catch myself.
Yes, our relationship does make us look at how we were raised, even how our husbands were raised, to find ourselves, to find our husbands.This is the essential question we are left with when we have been raised in abusive family systems, whatever else is floating around in there. But no matter how fast I danced, how much I understood, how often I forgave...my
D H was who he was.
It is complicated isn't it?
We were taught to be Madonna like, but no one taught us the whore part.They say that for Italian men, there is the Madonna, and there is the Whore.
So interesting you mention this, because in Streetcar named Desire Blanch is much the same. The Cliff notes are really focused on that.And none of that matters to the beautiful whore (Susan Sarandon) because she possesses herself. And no matter how many times she sells herself, she has never sold herself, because she has incorporated and cleared all the negatives surrounding whatever names others have assigned her to believe.
She knows a different truth.
I love that imagery.
Yes, value. Otherwise we can become things Cedar, toys. I think that is why many relationships fail. If we do not value ourselves, love ourselves, how can we love others, and in turn, how can they love us? We become mere things.For a woman to incorporate that kind of thinking (Madonna/Whore) in a man, she has to be very certain she is her own Whore. Her own Madonna. Her own self. There needs, I think, to be such value for herself in the woman that she can disbelieve whatever fantasy the man has grown up believing about women.
Yes. Men poor dears, raised to be tough, to ignore their feelings.Just as we need to come to grips with the truth that our husbands are not heroes who are never frightened, are people who sometimes don't know what to do, either.
And who need to be loved just for themselves, sometimes.
Maybe that is the crux of misogyny?
Huh. When the hubs had his first bout of heart infection, I got the phone call no one wants to get, ever. "Hello, are you related to ---- ----? This is Officer so&so.....""Well, hello there."
"Have you been here, the whole time?"
My hubs had been battling night sweats, weight loss, been to the Docs-no help. Flu, night sweats can be anything....He was still working and had not come home the usual time. In fact, Volcano (2nd daughters insignificant other) said to me "Dad is not home yet" I thought, eh, he went to the store.
The policeman found him stopped in the middle of the road, confused and delirious.
"Maam, your husband is combative..." My heart started pounding and sunk, I swallowed hard, "Please sir, call an ambulance that is not him, something is very wrong."
I rushed to the scene with Tornado, the officer kindly waited for us to pick up hubs truck.
Hubs was in emergency. 104 fever, extremely low blood pressure, on the brink. The Dr. pulled me aside and said it was very, very bad, to stay close.
I went to his bedside, beep beep of heart monitor, iv's, all hooked up he was. I looked at his blood pressure reading, not good.
He turned to look at me...... with a big smile on his face. "Oh there you are" he chuckled. He was absolutely giddy. He joked and laughed the entire time.
When he was more stable, my daughters and I went to eat. I told them "You see that man in there, the happy go lucky guy? THAT is the man I married, that is your father."And there is a real person there, under everything I believed about him and about me, and I love him so much because he taught me to love myself.
In the hustle and bustle and seriousness of life, the hubs had buried that part.
So true, Cedar, so true. We could not stand up to our FOO, we were children. But we had to stand up to our D H. In the raising of my children, more memories were revealed, because I did not want to repeat what was for me, but it gets complicated because we were dealing with two FOO!I had to stand up to my D H or I could never in a million years have stood up to my mother and my family of origin. I am still tumbling into nasty, surprising true things about the way my family of origin worked.
How did I not see it?
Numbing. Survival. As a child, what can anyone do to change family dynamics? Stuff it down.Everything was forever a defensive/protective "That is my mother." Or, "That's just mom. Or, sister. Or, brother." They really did commit the craziest actions, say the craziest things. It was as though I had committed to understanding and forgiving thoughts and words and actions that were wrong from their inception...but I don't know why I did that. As we have gone through these past months on FOO Chronicles, there were so many times I felt shame at who they were and at who that made me.
It comes out at the strangest times in bits and pieces, a scent, a food, an argument.
You know Cedar, the hubs and I did not finish that movie.For instance, think about the clip with my chill amorata Marlon Brando and that woman. The woman is presented as powerful/powerless; as slinking, and somehow, ugly in the face of her desire.
We miss stuff like that, all the time.
To my surprise, my hubs, Shrek himself, got angry at Stanley.
"This movie is STUPID, the guy is an IDIOT, he only wants the sisters money, and then he what, ends up RAPING her, Yah? Isn't that what happens?"
I looked up from my Cliff notes in shock. I didn't know what the movie was about until reading them. "So you remember the movie?"
"Yah, it was stupid then and it's stupid now."
Huh. That movie touched a deep chord in the hubs. I think back on the Cliff notes,
"The most obvious difference between the worlds of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski lies in the diversity of their backgrounds. We immediately recognize that the very name DuBois and Kowalski contrast......
....We assume DuBois to be an aristocratic name, possibly one with a proud heritage. A DuBois wouldn't be found working in a steel mill, as would a Kowalski. A DuBois speaks softly and flittingly. A Kowalski speaks loud and brutally. Kowalskis relish loud poker parties with their characteristic rough humor. Blanche DuBois winces at this. Her preferences for entertainment are teas, cocktails, and luncheons. Speech, to Stanley, is a way of expressing his wants, likes, and dislikes. Blanche speaks on a higher level."
This is sort of...us. Hubs comes from a working class family, I am from one too, but my Dad made a comfortable living. Hubs has a history with D.V. with his Dad. Brutal. FOO. My FOO history is more on a psychological level. No violence.
For hubs, the history is more insidious. Emotional, physical abuse. On top of that the whole "got to be a man thing. "
I think when he was watching Stanley he was remembering his father, how he mistreated his mother.....
He could not watch the movie.
Yes Cedar, how true.If we begin to watch, then we will see. That too is an area of healing for all of us, male and female, alike. We need to heal into compassion for ourselves and our mates and our kids. We all are doing the best we know, and none of us really does know.
I wonder too, for my parents, how was their FOO? What shaped them?
So, I am thinking again about allowing my family of origin forgiveness, or trust, or belief in them. In reality, I had no right to do that. To lose even one felicity is to be robbed of more than we have a right to spare. (That is Charles Williams, of course. Descent Into Hell.) I needed to wake up, and stand up, not even so much to Family of Origin, but to and for myself. I needed to say what was true, and to see the ugliness that was true and stop ignoring what was happening because I was forever believing it would be getting better oh, just any minute, now.
It is hard work, this delving into ourselves, the history. Somehow necessary work?
My hubs chides me as I sit at the computer.
Boy says "Mom what are you doing?" I reply "Studying"
at the same time hubs yells from the bedroom "NOTHING".
Too bad. I am cherishing this time with my cyber friends. We are discussing things here that the hubs will never speak with me about, because he still has the need to keep it all buried.
That is his choice.
My choice is to open the book and discover.
I do not want to let my devaluation continue the patterning that led me to enable.
In this journey to self discovery, I will help myself, and I will help my adult children, by not helping them.
Thank you Cedar, and my warrior sisters.
Sorry my posts are so long, perhaps I am writing a....book.
Leafy
Last edited: