Patriarchy

You can’t say I don’t take seriously my position as eldest child in a family of seven, and eldest grandchild on my mother’s side. And I admit to being male. I can say that I have not experienced any advantage from these positions. Responsibility, yes, and the work loads that come with it, but no rule and certainly no financial gain. That goes for my position as husband and father too. I do not think of myself as a patriarch.

Perhaps this is for lack of role models. Looking back over my family, as I have known them for sixty-seven years, I witnessed much love and sacrifice, discord and willfulness, but spread around generously between paters and maters. If anything, I would give more weight to the maternal sides on the domineering front.

My own parents were an even match, ever struggling to provide for their brood of seven. But in the PR department my mother prevailed. I knew my maternal grandparents best of all, also for the record that they kept of their van der Laan Venture. They were full partners in a hard but fruitful life. My dad’s mother certainly talked more than her husband, but in the stories I heard and during the visits they made from Holland, I never sensed an autocracy.

My wife’s parents were as different as mine, but, aside from certain conservative roles like praying and scripture reading, they seemed to steer through life in tandem. Her paternal grandparents I never knew, nor did I ever meet the other Opa who came to Canada at the age of sixty. But his wife’s reputation as a sharp-tongued matriarch endures. In fact, on the conservative side of my Dutch-Canadian milieu, I seem to hear more about matriarchs than patriarchs.

In my family tree (which I’ve worked back to the sixteenth century), my ancestors are mostly from the North of Holland. With some notable exceptions early on, they are ordinary (little) people; farmers, house wives, sailors, farm helpers, and maids. At this lower end of the social ladder (and I include myself here), necessity trumps convention, and I expect families ploughed their way through as a cooperative rather than a hierarchy.

With ne’er an overbearing patriarch in sight, I count myself blessed. Many have not escaped repression or exclusion by self-serving, paternalistic, patriarchal masters. I am thankful for the long-suffering liberators that shifted culture to make this less acceptable and less likely, even while I recognize that the job is not done.

But! When I look back over a long history, observing customs and traditions and hierarchies that are no longer acceptable, I find myself in no place to judge. Culture has always been a work in progress, and much of it has been a collaboration to deal fruitfully, as best as possible, with circumstances and even older traditions. What stands out for me as I watch and read historical dramas is not so much the hierarchy but the malice that can infect it. “Upstairs, Downstairs” could not fly on PBS without it.

Every human heart is riven by sin — in every class, gender and race. Patriarchy has been a problem, not because it’s some grand conspiracy, but because of a lack of good will. And good will seems in increasingly short supply in today’s hostile, intersectional struggles. What we need is a Revival not a Deconstruction.