Today, on MPR, Kari Miller was talking ta a writer who is from Canada (and was a dancer), but who moved to NYC and became a novelist. Keri Miller asked if she (the author) ever played the game with her friends of asking, “What was your hinge moment?” She went on to explain what a hinge moment was (I call them sliding door moments), and I burst into laughter. not because it was a silly question but because it, of course, immediately makes me think of my biggest hinge moment and what the alternate ending would have been.
We’ll get there in a second.
I’ve had other hinge moments, of course. When I was eighteen, I felt pressured to go to college. I didn’t want to, but my mother made it seem like I had no other option.
Side note: I have my issues with myfather. Many, many issues. But him being absent from my life means that most of the direct pressure was from my mother.
I had a boyfriend at that time. He was valedictorian of his class in his high school and got something like 1540 on his SATs. 800 on the math and 740 on the vocab/English. He applied to Stanford, Harvard, and a few other Ivies. Carleton College (which is local) was his safety school. I applied to schools next to wherever he applied because why not? I didn’t want to go, anyway, so why not pick it that way? He ended up choosing Stanford, which meant I was supposed to go to UC Santa Clara. He was firm that if we were going to stay together, I had to follow him.
Here’s the thing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay together. He was the first boy I had dated, and I bought into the whole ‘get married and have children’ bullshit that I was fed on a daily basis as an American girl (at the time). Both my cultures (American and Taiwanese) devalued girls and put them secondary to boys. Secondary? Sometimes it felt as if it was tertiary or worse. Like we weren’t supposed to take up any space at all.
And it’s not just men. Women can be and often are the worst pushers of sexist bullshit. They uphold the patriarchy with just as much zeal if not more than men. Because it gives them status in the world. They are one-up on those dastardly feminist, but it’s a silppery slope. Because the minute you step out of line, you’ll get smacked back into place. Or you’ll be put on the ‘bad girl’ list.