I wrote this little piece about ten years ago. I have taken it from my “archives” and reprinted it here because it addresses another facet of my personality and development as a woman who was born in 1955. It is as follows:

I have been a writer since early adolescence. That was when I began to express my fears, anxieties, and frustrations about my chaotic homelife, and just the generally chaotic business of growing up, by way of short-story fiction. I needed a strong, guiding figure in my life so I created my own “parent” in the fictional guise of Michael James Peters, a pediatrician who was at that time in his early 40s with a wife and six kids. I started out writing about his interactions with his adolescent patients, adolescent medicine being his specialty area, and left no area off-limits. (I seemed to be particularly fascinated with 16-year-olds contracting STDs. Considering that this was 1969, I was a little before my time!) I delved into a highly sensitive area when I created one of Mike Peters’ patients, a 13-year-old boy by the name of Randy Kelly who was in an abusive home and took Mike into his confidence. When Randy was assaulted by his stepfather and required hospitalization, it was Mike and his wife, Gloria, who stepped up to the plate to take Randy in as a foster son. (Can you imagine my mother’s horror when she discovered this story, penciled in a school notebook by her eighth grade daughter? The original draft somehow just *vanished!*)

I made many discoveries about myself through this writing over the years and let my therapist read some of those stories some years back. Since my own self-esteem issues were part of the therapeutic discussions, he asked me, “Why did you make Gloria this nonexistent character? What’s up with that?” This is what I wrote in response to that question:

In the original “Behind Door #3″ story, Gloria is a nonexistent character. All the interaction takes place between Mike (her husband) and Randy while Gloria typically sleeps through these major episodes. Bruce [my therapist] was the one who pointed this out to me. He observed that Mike is this strong, sensitive, professional, intelligent (and good-looking) man, and he’s married to this woman who apparently has no personality and no major contributions to make. Bruce asked me if I really thought that a man such as Mike Peters would be married to such a nondescript woman. He further pressed me to think about why I had developed her that way to begin with.

I thought long and hard about it and realized that I did not have a very positive impression of womanhood. I really didn’t have positive female role models in my personal life when I was growing up. I wanted to be exactly the opposite of my mother, as a matter of fact! My father was my supportive parent, the one I turned to for understanding, comfort and strength.

The social climate at the time I was growing up further reinforced my impression of women as ornamental rather than functional, as weak rather than competent. Of course, a lot of it was gleaned from television: the early sit-coms of “The Donna Reed Show,” “Leave It To Beaver,” “Ozzie & Harriet,” “Father Knows Best.” The husband and father was always going off to work at the office to accomplish great things and provide for his family, while his wife just stayed at home in her dress, high heels, and pearls and put wonderful meals on the table for her family to enjoy when they came home. If anything serious happened on the show, “Dad/Dear” had to be called in to the rescue to deal with the crisis.

The commercials, however, were the worst of all. Women fretted about such important things in life as “ring around the collar” and “ugly wax build-up” on their kitchen floors. They were devastated if their husbands complained about stale sandwiches in their lunchboxes because she didn’t use the right plastic wrap or their glassware came out of the dishwasher with water spots. My personal feeling was, “If this is what women do with their lives, just take me out and shoot me now!”

Likewise, my upbringing and my Catholic schooling reinforced this message that women were weak and dependent. Even though I was a straight-A student and began talking about being a doctor when I was about twelve, my mother would look at me like I had my head up my butt and advise, “You’d better take typing and shorthand, anyway….just in case your husband is ever out of work. Then you’ll have something to fall back on.”

Of course, the nuns thought it great when a Catholic girl had the noble aspirations to be a good wife and mother. Academic performance didn’t really count for much. The straight-A college preppies got no more encouragement towards career goals and personal achievements than their average counterparts in Home Ec and Secretarial Skills 101.

I realize that I did not like the messages I was getting about women’s roles in our culture. Unconsciously, I aligned myself with the male world where I felt more emotionally comfortable, where individuals were encouraged to achieve and succeed, where it was expected that one would show strength and competency.

It took me quite awhile to realize that women are strong, competent, intelligent people, too. That was when I consciously began to work on developing the character of Gloria Peters, trying to turn her into a woman I could be proud of. Of course, in the process, I was trying to change my own attitudes about myself and my perception of the female role…