There's an Old Man Living in my Right Hip

(We’ve been through a lot together.)

He’s always there. I felt him this morning while doing yin yoga in a meditative state. He was sad and a little angry. He’s a straight shooter; he doesn’t go for all this woo-woo crap. He’s been there my whole life. He’s softer now and worn down like pale, contoured driftwood and other heartbreaking reminders of a continued existence shaped by things past. Sometimes I think he’s an inheritance from my ancestors.

My paternal great grandfather, for example, loved his wife. He worked hard for 12-hour shifts in the coal mines and every day on his way home, he stopped at the florist to clean his hands and face and buy a red rose for his wife. Samuel was handsome and strong, Hearing women often flirted with him until they realized he was Deaf and their attention turned kind and condescending, pitying. He smiled his confident, broad smile and didn’t mind it one bit because his wife was home waiting for him, her curvy body swaying around the warm kitchen preparing food. When he arrived home, he would give her the rose with a respectful bow.

Each day, she would take it as though it were the first time he’d given it, graciously and reverently, and place it in a slender glass vase cut like crystal. The light would bounce off the beveled surfaces of the glass and play on the ceiling and walls, as though the flower, the symbol of their bond, emanated it like visible joy. When the rose was in its place, she would turn from it to her husband, Samuel, and he would take her hips in his strong hands, pull her toward him, and kiss her long. Unless the children were near, then she would place a light kiss high on his left cheek and pull away demurely.

Their unspoken understanding—that he was the owner and she, part of his property—didn’t stifle the love. Still, she wouldn’t dare go anywhere or do anything without his permission. She felt safe and secure in his possession. He wouldn’t dare stray from her affection, even when she didn’t give it freely. He was loyal. He provided. He fathered. He husbanded. This provider-father-husband patriarch man who expected the same from his sons was cut from the same cloth as his father and his father before him, and back and back. Other, subtler parts of his character were buried under the bedrock of this role. It’s necessity and immutability weren’t even perceived much less questioned.

When Samuel lost his job at the coal mine, he lost this essential structure and fell into a deep sense of inadequacy. At first, his pride was too large to take menial jobs, but his pride was much too large to be around the house with his wife, her having to cook and clean around him. The rooms were too small and his presence too large for either of them to stand it for more than a few days. So Samuel began taking whatever work he could get. And when he couldn’t get any work, he would walk the streets of the town until he reached the railroad then walk the railroad until he felt the vibrations of a coming freight train.

Sometimes, he would stand in the center of the tracks and fantasize that the train would collide with his massive body, the man that he was, the man he could no longer fully be, and remove him from its smothering confines. Set him free. But ultimately, he would fill with a fear so dense and hot that it would propel him from the track onto the dirt at the last moment and the wind of the train thundering inches from his head would hammer his ears sealed from sound to the extent that he could imagine hearing it.

Years ago, I met Hal and Sidra Stone, founders of Voice Dialogue, the Psychology of the Selves. It’s a theory that each of us harbors many “selves,” many harmonious and conflicting energies within — some that are primary and projected into the world, and others that are shadow or disowned and often suppressed. Then there is what they call the aware ego, which to me sounds like the neutral mind they talk about in yoga. It’s the place that exists on the narrow path between oceans of consciousness—the place of awareness that can hear and see all the various energies with compassion and without judgement.

As simple and obvious as this might seem, as reminiscent of several other theories and methodologies throughout history (Jungian, Gestalt, Internal Family Systems), there is a subtle complexity to it that lends it richness and depth. The development of an aware ego and the ability to channel life decisions through it is extremely difficult for most people and can take years of hard work.

Sidra Stone wrote, in her book The Shadow King, about the inner patriarch and how it’s the dark force within holding us back. Ironically, it’s generations of mothers who have taught their daughters the rules of patriarchy and their rightful role within it that has taught our inner patriarchs what they know and love. The solution for women, she posits, is to more clearly formulate the opposites within, so that we can “balance the power of the Inner Patriarch and move beyond the dualistic universe in which he lives.”

My oldest friend and mentor, one of the closest people to me in this life, Iudita, had been telling me about the Stones, her teachers, since I’ve known her. A few times, when I was particularly struggling with some turmoil in my life, she’s facilitated me. She has worked as a Voice Dialogue Facilitator and therapist for decades, guiding people through their vast psychic terrain, gently introducing them to the strangers they encounter there, helping them to integrate and balance these myriad energies, and finally to hold them all in tune from the level of compassionate awareness.

This is not a healing practice that requires solitude or isolation. As it happens, this process is helped along by interpersonal relationships, as we tend to attract people as lovers who carry our disowned selves as primary energies. We come together with them to integrate those energies and become more whole. Therefore, this work helps create relationships that stay vital and vulnerable and dynamic for long durations. And it helps individuals to experience the same kind of raw relationship to life and to the world.

            bell hooks wrote in her philosophical book, Feminism is for Everybody, about the concept of the inner patriarch and how women can internalize the patriarchal values and norms imposed by society. This internalization leads to self-oppression, where women adopt limiting beliefs about themselves and their capabilities, often unconsciously reinforcing the same systems that oppress them. She also writes how systemic sexism via patriarchy hurts all people, not just women. “Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs,” she writes, and I think of my ancestor Samuel, how he nearly lost his will to live when he met with the truth of his vulnerability and lost the most essential part of his role: Provider.

Being a woman who loves women, my internal patriarch — that old man living in my right hip — I’ve dubbed him the Old-Fashioned Husband. When I’m in a romantic relationship with a woman, he shows up as very loyal and committed. He shows up in my parenting also. He fills my veins with father and husband and steady, devoted, thinly veiled misogyny.

He’s a good provider and a solid worker — he has the endurance to finish whatever he starts and has kept me in bad relationships longer than I should have stayed. I usually need to resist his urgency to have me drop down on one knee and propose, which he always wants to do, and it’s taken me a long time to teach him that no, women are not property to be owned. I’m sure this old man in me has been the root of some of my own self-limiting beliefs as well, but he mainly manifests with his desires and expectations from the women I’ve loved. Unless they’re waiting at the door in a dress, heals, and full makeup with a cocktail to hand me when I get home from work, and with dinner warming in the stove, he’s impossible to please.

            Perhaps it’s because he’s never gotten his way in this fantasy that he’s quieted down as a presence in me. Or maybe it has to do with my physically debilitating accident that left me unable to work for a while and painfully aware of my true vulnerability in this world, much like what happened with Samuel when he lost his job, his life’s career. Maybe it’s the decades of balancing he’s been subjected to with my other, equally strong selves that are radical liberals and feminists with more of a free love philosophy on romance. It’s all these, combined, and more.

There are pieces to the puzzle of what it means to be this woman that I can’t fully understand and probably never will. Much like the way we can never look directly into our own faces, we can only get reflections and shadows. And though my Old-Fashioned Husband will always be a square in the tapestry of me, he’ll be kept subordinate to the strong womb-having energies he’s surrounded by, and thus in his proper place.