Concerning Matches and Redneck Women…

It’s an old saying, an old superstition if you will that has a solid basis in fact.  I’m pretty sure it began among the infantrymen, the soldiers of the great wars and it has to do with not getting yourself shot.  It’s said to be terrible luck to be the third man to light his cigarette from the same match.  Makes sense, by the time the third guy gets a light the sniper out there in the darkness has a bullet on the way aimed at that tiny dot of light that just happens to be right in front of your face. It dawns on me though I’ve seen something concerning women that also comes in sets of three, and in point of fact is exactly opposite the first consideration.

As is so often the case this observation came into focus courtesy of one of the gals crewing the diner.  Normally she’ll be working day shift, moving like the wind and keeping the whole operation pointed in the right direction, a true veteran.  But for the last few weeks staffing issues have caused her to work the hoot owl overnight shift a few days a week.  Now the overnight shift is either utterly dead or utter chaos (when the drunks arrive out of the bars) and so during the dead times she gets to be human, play with the regulars and tease the cooks to fill the time.

The other night I was camping in the diner, drawing doodles and trying to bring a totally different thought (from the Third Reality of Man essays) into focus when I overheard her talking to a fellow new to the place.  They were discussing marriages, he was fishing for her current status (be careful what you ask for dude, you’ll end up like the Indian who chased the puma till the cat caught him!).  Anyway, what caught my attention was a change in her tone of voice, for a little bit it went soft and sensual, almost to be called seductive, way out of character for her.  Normally she’s the kind to say “Oh hell yeah!” with a great big grin and wiggle, you know, kid sister of the cowboy who’ll say “I don’t give a damn how big an ole’ boy he is, I’ll whup his ass anyway”  and then grin.  But not in that moment. In that moment, for a few moments, she was a totally different woman.

What did she say?  She said “I’m on my third now, and I think he might just make it.”  I looked up, took in the look on her face and looked back down shaking my head.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard something similar, in a similar tone of voice and demeanor, and what suddenly dawned on me was that every time it was from a country girl, a redneck woman just as tough as her brother, in some ways tougher.  I filed away her expression in the library (yea, that’s one of the ways I want to remember her) and since I wasn’t having any luck on what I’d been working on anyway changed the direction of my thought.

To a totally informal quicky count three quarters of the country women I know are on a third husband.  Why is it so many of the country girls don’t seem to settle down until they’re with their third husband?    Maybe one in four will have found her mate with her first husband, but if the first doesn’t work out they almost always seem to settle down with number three.  Not very many seconds at all.

I’m coming to believe the reason has to do with her pride, and yes, a country woman is a proud creature.  Ignore that fact at your own risk, bro.  I think it has to do with her pride, how that pride is expressed as she’s in the process of growing up, how the social elements involved with the expression of that pride become a filter of a sort on what actually makes it to her heart for her to work with while the job of growing up is underway.  It’s starting to make more and more sense why and how such a filter would have a great deal to do with the whole third man thing. 

The country life is in many ways a great deal more honest than the city life.  Fact takes priority over opinion.  One of the facts of country life is that the sisters compete heads up with their brothers in many of the same realms, always have.  She may not be able to throw quite as heavy a bale of hay as he can, but she can stay in the field just as long if not longer.    She doesn’t need to take anyone’s word on what she’s worth, base her self esteem on some man’s opinion of her, she has other things, real things, to draw from.  Seriously.  You think you can outride me?  Get on your horse and prove it.  Right.  She’s lighter, better balance, crushes Volkswagens between her thighs just for practice and more importantly she was second momma to that colt, it’s her horse and the animal will die trying if she asks.  That sort of thing.

Long and short of it is when you’re talking about a genuine country woman descended from and still in the mindset evolved by the pioneering women of the old west the whole women’s lib thing really didn’t have much traction in her life.  The elements of her self esteem, her pride were not formed in the same set of molds as those born to the urban or suburban life.  She really didn’t need liberating, she was never enslaved to begin with.  

Her problem is finding men folk undamaged by what the maturation of the land and culture have done to their lives.  The sad truth is that the country man took more damage to feminism than did the country woman.  The closing of the land closed off so many of the root sources of a country man’s pride and identity that in what is essentially an expression of despair the incidences of gross excess in all of the self destructive behaviors began climbing like a homesick angel.   She has a hard time finding a man of her own kind whose life isn’t deformed and incomplete by reason of the compression.

I think it’s that compression of the country man’s life that drives the whole affair. 

Like I said, the country girl compete with her brothers pretty well heads up, a way for both to establish identity and status within their world.  But what happens when the competition isn’t based on the things required to take a chunk of wilderness and turn it into a home?  What happens when the competitions become who can out endure who in the self destructive behaviors? 

(Ok dammit, load up twenty bucks worth of Tammy Why-Not on the jukebox and someone go get some more beer, we’re almost out and what I’m gonna be talking about next is gonna need a whole bunch of both)

Number one?  He’s the guy she couldn’t drink under the table.  He’s the man whose passion and pride was just as hot as hers, she couldn’t intimidate him into subservience.  He’s the guy the other girls want but he’s mine dammit, keep your hands off (and of course, same same from his side).  He’s the guy who showed up one night at their lover’s bed carrying a (metaphorical) hackamore bridle only to find her wearing a set of (allegorical) Spanish spurs… barefoot.  Round and round they go, and in the end decide if neither can take the other down then they might as well get married because what the hell, if we can’t take each other down then life ain’t got half a chance of taking us down playing as a team.

Sometimes it works, but only when the underlying attitudes on a great many things are still synchronized by their culture.  The ever more elevated failure rate of first marriages gives pretty solid evidence of how often that happens.  The changes of time and tide have left both compromised, and he more than she.  They chose each other not based on their relative abilities at doing positive things but rather on their abilities to endure the self destructive things adopted as substitutes for what changing times have denied.  Fact is that sort of endurance isn’t the same thing at all as the sort of endurance needed to support each other across the years and the tears, nor does it do a thing for learning the wisdom of when to offer support, and when not.  More often than not the marriage fails as they turn and return to the only things they know… a challenge of the self destructive just when both are most desperately in need of genuine support rather than a competition of internal ego.

Number two?  That’s when they realize what happened with number one and set about learning how to be supportive in a high endurance relationship.  A good thing really, but one minor problem:  when self reliance is a point of pride at the deepest of levels for one to offer support to the other the other has to be in need of support or what is offered becomes an insult.  When both  are in the support mode?  It’s impossible.  For the relationship to work both must be perpetually off their game, eroding away the sources of their emotional strength in order to provide the other with something where they need support.  Often enough the self destructive behaviors are continued more to compel a state where support is needed rather than any genuine desire.  Still a terribly negative spiral, a relationship based not on mutual strengths but on mutual weaknesses.  Co-dependence takes the place of both bridle and spurs.  They don’t tend to last long, a relationship like that is actually harder on a life than the first kind, it’s get out or degrade into broken down derelicts.  The vast majority get out, and fairly quickly.  What happens to them that don’t generally ain’t very pretty.

That’s what she’s known as she finished growing up.  They married young, that’s part of the convention of the culture, to marry young and start the work while you’re at the peak strength of youth.  When the land was a challenge to fill both lives to the limits of that strength it makes perfect sense.  But… that ain’t the way things are anymore. 

What usually happens is that by the time she’s looking for number three, usually with two or three children to raise, she’s actually had a chance to understand what it takes to build a marriage.  Both she and the guys who moved opposite her in this dance of changing times have had the chance to realize that building a home in today’s world is still a matter of taking that home away from the wilderness, it just isn’t the honest wilderness of nature but rather the despicable and dishonest wilderness of modern sexual politics where the shamans and the shrinks, the macho gay masters and the feminazi libber lesbians are constantly working to make sure anyone who has any intent to a stable fertile hetero relationship will fail that understanding and ultimately degrade into the sort of derelicts where they harvest both their living and their livelihood.

So, back to where this little ramble began?  Third man on a match?  Very bad idea.  But if you happen to be the third man to strike fire in country girls heart?  It’s just entirely possible fate just put the best thing that could ever happen to you right there where you can see her… if you’re strong enough in the ways that really matter to half way keep up with her.