Stand by Your Man. But Not Your Daughter

I grew up in a house where songs such as "Stand by Your Man," "Substitute," and "Jolene" were seen as containing valuable words of wisdom. They were played daily on one of our two cassette players- in the kitchen or in the car on the way to school. The message was clear: if you were lucky enough to "bag" a man—no matter what kind of man and by what means—then you must do anything to keep him. You might not love him, and he might not love you, but as long as you had one that was yours, nothing else mattered.

Even my My Little Pony episodes were in on it. Ponies wondered how they could change their appearance and pretend to like football to gain themselves a boyfriend. Being yourself was not an option.

It was referred to as love, but it wasn’t really. It was ownership. Possession. Ostensibly the girl owned the boy, but to me it seemed clear that this was not true.

When I was seventeen years old, my mum threw out my stepdad of twelve years because she finally seemed to have noticed that a man who hit her until she passed out and slept with other women even while she was pregnant with his son was not quite the ideal life partner. She trailed around the house for days, stroking the kitchen worktop and sighing deep, expressive sighs. Her usual daily showers were indefinitely postponed, and her make up bag was neglected, looking sad and lost, abandoned down the side of the sofa. The initial phase of wallowing in her misery was waiting to make way for some more positive outlook. I was waiting too. I made cups of tea, chatted inanely about the neighbors, and fed my brothers on my speciality, Dairylea triangles on toast.

I was first a witness to the aggressive relationship between my mum and her boyfriend when I was twelve years old. Lying in bed, I couldn’t sleep through their shouting and I ventured downstairs to see what was going on. My mum was lying on her back on our chintz sofa, one hand gripping a cushion and the other half-raised before her face. Noticing the girl hovering, horror-struck, in the doorway, he roared for me to get back to bed. I don’t think I was physically capable of movement at the time. Seeing this, he made a move towards me. My mum shouted for him to leave me alone, which spurred him on to continue hitting her more vehemently than before.

I ran upstairs to their bedroom and plugged in our second phone. It was usually unplugged so that it couldn’t wake my stepdad while he slept off his hangovers until the early afternoon. I called my granny, and she called the police. That was the first time that he left. My mum refused to press charges, my stepdad spent the night sleeping on a park bench in his duffel coat, and within a matter of days he was back and I was expected to pretend that nothing had happened. As far as my brothers knew, nothing had.

By the time I was seventeen, this cycle had repeated itself ad infinitum and I held out little hope that this time would be any different. In the meantime, my granny had died and I was alone with my sad knowledge of my stepdad’s occasional periods of absence and their cause. Still, I could only believe that one day someone besides myself would notice that he should not be allowed to return. Stand by your man? There must—surely—be a limit.

On day four, leaning down to the sofa where my mum lay prostrate with a cup of weak tea in hand, I smiled as she opened her eyes. She narrowed her gaze and hissed,

“This is all your fault. You made me make him leave. And now he might never come back.”

Stunned, I left the room.

I saw myself as my mum’s rescuer. Unbiased by thoughts of a twelve-year relationship and the indiscriminate loyalty this seemed to inspire, I knew that she—and we—would be better off without him. She would be better off with someone else. She would be better off alone. Somehow, my own impression of myself wasn’t my mother’s. There was no doubt that her gaze had been filled with malice. I wasn’t sure what to do with this.

My cousin came over that night. She too was mourning the loss of a boyfriend who had recently dumped her via telephone. She’d recently confessed to me that she still slept with an unwashed pair of his boxer shorts underneath her pillow. Between them and a bottle of wine or two in the kitchen, they decided that love conquers all and that my mum should do anything she could to regain her true love. My cousin only wished, she said, that she could do the same herself.

She stepped into the dining room where I sat, completing my homework.

“You’re cold, you are,” she said. “You can see your mum is suffering and you don’t care.”

She shook me.

“How did you get so cold?”

The next day, my mum left my nine and fifteen year old brothers in my care while she travelled to the north of Scotland by train, to recover my stepdad from his parents’ farm where he’d retreated this time. In a week, back they would be. Just like nothing had happened.

Because, of course, you must stand by your man.