General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The latent sexism of the male marriage proposal [View all]hunter
(38,309 posts)The man always knows when it's time to either propose or flee in terror.
My wild west great grandma continued to test the men who'd married into her family until the day she died.
I'm pretty sure she thought it was her sacred Earth Mother duty to dispose of the bad men. My dad passed her tests because he could catch fish and serve them for dinner, her horses and dogs liked him, and he's an artist. He even passed the crazy little grandma-in-law-waving-a-big-knife-in-his-face test. I was five, I remember that.
I also remember my great grandma cutting apart fish, birds, and small mammals for dinner faster than I could comprehend the movements of her hands and her knife. I've no doubt she could cut up a bad man too.
Much weirdness.
In a crowded two room cabin without indoor plumbing there's not much privacy. In Scandinavian tradition, transplanted to the American Wild West, nobody cared. I saw eighty year old boobs, her nipples like two eyes just above her navel. The girls in our family actually bathed with her, no reason to waste water heated on the wood stove and poured into the galvanized metal tub. My sister writes some funny stories.
My wife is a child of similar Native American and Gaelic matriarchies. My proposal was simply a formality. Our hearts were one before our big Catholic wedding.