The Grandmother Class

Moving Away from the Belief that Life Can Be Owned

Mother God circa 4000 BCE

Now, at grandmother age, I reside inside the long view. After the decades it took to heal the personal trauma caused by our dominator culture, I’m free. And while I have enormous compassion for the weary travelers still trodding Recovery Road, I’m less and less interested in personal healing. Twelve-Step rooms, therapy couches, divorce courts, yoga studios, and almost all alternative spiritual communities are full of people walking the path of healing these unnecessary wounds. It’s hard, good work. But I’ve met so many iterations of my story that it's ceased to be personal. It’s time, now, to prevent the harm. Let’s cut to the root of the problem.

My healing took extra decades, I think, because I never connected the cultural dots. For too long, I thought my story was about my mother and my father, our private hell and the pact we had never to speak of it outside the home, and barely mention it inside. I thought we were a separate, isolated nuclear unit with alcohol and violence problems few other families had. Our hell grew organically from the ground beneath my particular mother and father. I now regret how little compassion I had for them, how paltry my love, and my unwillingness to extend my healing to them.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die.

Sharon Olds, from I Go Back to May 1937

This shift to a broader view coincides with changes in my short-term memory that come with aging. I no longer need to keep track of details or multitask as I did when I was a full-time high school teacher while raising a family. Thank the gods for small mercies. When the changes to my memory started, I thought it was a regrettable sign of my coming dementia. Now, I see it as a wonderful blessing, a relaxing into a much larger (grand) point of view. Biologically, I’ve stopped sweating the small stuff.

So now, at some 68 years old, I’ve become grand. I recognize that my personal trauma, and everyone else’s, came directly out of monotheistic patriarchal capitalism. My family followed a common enough pattern, which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil - only writ small.

I spent a great deal of time in spiritual communities that taught transcendence, another patriarchal idea. I learned detachment, that desires were suspect, to be “in the world, but not of it,” as an ideal. I was going for the big prize: enlightenment. I simply did not want to be here, yet I was. Understandable, perhaps, but counterproductive, since I am here. This kind of spiritual detachment is a form of approved dissociation. Not of the individual, I was a master of that, too, but of the sub-culture. The opposite of detached enlightenment is caring, you know, giving a shit.

The idea that this world is inherently evil, fallen, or not the “truth of being,” comes from an ancient mythological gaslighting. I’m just so tired of talking about Eve and original sin, but you know. In almost all of these mythologies, a woman is at fault, or at least a female divinity, such as the Gnostics’ Sophia, who wanted a child and became pregnant without the involvement of her male partner. That’s parthenogenesis, or out of only herself, the way the divine feminine reproduced before patriarchal ideals were mythologized. Because she did it that way, she created everything bad in the world, and even the world was bad. Rotten to the core. And now, thanks to Sophia, we have to work to perfect our perception and get back to the good stuff, which is in some higher realm.

In almost all of these mythologies, sex is bad because the world is bad, because women are bad, because sex is bad. And that’s why the world is bad. Don’t look behind door #3. It isn’t because patriarchal domination is bad. No, it’s not that the fathers are wrong. It’s not that capitalism is bad. It’s not that the desire to hoard wealth is bad. Or the belief that if we can own women, we can own life. No. It’s definitely not that. Hmmm. Let me think. It’s that we’re not really physical beings. We’re spirits or souls, longing for our true home, which is not here.

Yada, yada. Yet, here we are. Being physical. If the state killings in Minneapolis taught us anything, it’s that we should believe the evidence of our own eyes. We are real, physical beings in a real, physical world with real, physical needs. If you’ve ever given birth, you know that.

Here’s the thing. Nobody’s mythology is right. We are social animals, herd animals who once wandered as nomads before we threw down roots. Even after that, we were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. We already have, hardwired into us, the alternative to the horrible abuses of monotheistic patriarchal capitalism. And now we are trying to get back to the garden - home - to way things were. Home, in this analogy, is the real matrifocal societies we came from before the takeover of patriarchal control, which thought it could own life if it made women, the bringers of life, mere possessions.

Community, focused on supporting mothers, recognizes two universal truths. We are all born out of our mothers, and we are all going to die.

But alas. We live in a death-phobic culture that hates women. Let the self-destructive absurdity of that sink in. We live in a rape culture that allows something as vile as the Epstein pedophile ring to flourish to the tune of complete immunity from consequences. We’ve always had the forensic accounting tools to expose the whole multinational network. We even have a catch phrase left over from the Deep Throat years: Follow the Money.

Coatlicue, Mother of Gods

Here’s a question: If the victims of Epstein et al brought their complaint to a Supreme Court made up of 9 fully embodied, wide-awake Black and Indigenous grandmothers, would they have looked the other way? I’m talking fierce grandmothers, embodied grandmothers, daughters of gods like Coatlicue, the Mother of Gods, who represents the earth as both a womb and a grave - creation and destruction. Badass. Those judges would not clear their throats and look the other way.

Here’s the thing about mythologies. None of them is true, not even the dominant one, though a lot depends, for the powerful, in you having faith. Not them. They can be godless and do horrible things to children, but you must believe.

Mythologies are different ways of understanding the huge reality we find ourselves in. Some maps are better than others, but none of them are accurate. That’s why we need to really separate church and state and rescind all tax protections from politically active religious institutions. We could form a compromise here, where we fund specific ministries that demonstrate a quantifiable good to taxpayers, such as those that feed or house homeless people, for example. But if an institution is purely ideological, they can pay their own way. If their congregations can’t or won’t tithe, perhaps, like any business, they are bankrupt.

Instead, we should support artists. NEA grants should be much easier to get than a tax exemption for claiming you have a mythological being telling you what to preach. As a grandmother who can carry her own water, I’m done with preachers, especially those who want to uphold patriarchal dominance by shaming both men and women. Just done. And traditional family values. I’m done with that, too, because when they say “traditional,” they only mean the last few years or so. Mythologically speaking.

But here’s the thing. We shouldn’t have homeless people. Grandmothers wouldn’t stand for that. We could repurpose our empty office buildings, schools, malls, and other municipal buildings into apartments, like Hopi dwellings. We could embrace found extended families, mothers and babies, grown or still little, no matter how they were conceived, how much money the mother has, or what her pigmentation is. A baby is a baby is a baby. Period. And so is a family.

There is no reason we couldn’t have low-income mother-centered communal housing where tasks like cooking weeknight meals are shared, freeing people from the grind of the bed-for-profit hotel corporations, which can charge 3 times what rent is, locking single mothers and working families into homelessness. They simply can’t make enough money to get back into an apartment, but the corporation is making lots of money. Instead, we could put a grandmother in charge of the dwelling, which might even have an outdoor space, a communal living room with a big kitchen, and a pool. Our grandmother-in-charge could be a retired LCSW, a schoolteacher like me, or simply someone well-trained and armed with a wealth of referrals. Or, we could just let go of our addiction to credentials and put grandmothers in charge. How many lonely elderly people lack family connection and a deep sense of purpose? These models already exist.

Shareholders will happily tell you that capitalism is the best system that human beings have ever devised, and that patriarchal systems evolved 12k years ago or more, as a natural occurrence connected to the Agricultural Revolution. I call BS. That’s social Darwinism, and it’s not true. Our ancestors weren’t primitive children, and there’s nothing patriarchal about agriculture. Many settled peoples were matrifocal, right up to and including modern times.

In fact, in the 17th century, when the Pilgrims landed, the Haudenosaunee were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. They still are. In fact, the vast majority of casinos owned by tribes benefit everyone, not a single owner. The tribal members are the shareholders. In many cases, they provide a reliable universal basic income for tribal members. That model could benefit all of us if only we would learn from it.

Many countries have shown us that the functions of government can be run like companies - with the people as shareholders, for a profit, providing a good middle-class income and guarantees for the people employed there. The U.S. Postal Service operated this way until 2005, when Congress hamstrung the agency in hopes we’d end up in a mess so bad we’d let them privatize the whole thing. This is one of the many ways governments can raise cash without taxing citizens. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tax obscene wealth. We should. I draw the obscenity line at 50 million for an individual, 100 million for a partnership. It doesn’t matter so much where we draw the line, only that we draw one. The oceans will thank us for every gigayacht and its support vessels we remove from the high seas.

Support vessels. That one’s rich.

Do they all look like giant penises?

So, what would it look like if we took the collapse of our culture and the dismantling of our government as the benefit it could be? I mean. Come on. Wouldn’t it be delicious if our flirtation with MAGA, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the right-wing disinformation networks resulted in the end of the good-ole-boys white supremacist Christo-fascist capitalism? I mean, just imagine.

In fact, by destroying the old ways of government, they jump-started the project for us. I can’t say I’m grateful yet, but it’s on my gratitude list. I’m faking it till I make it.

First, don’t let any billionaire (or even a lowly millionaire) tell you that we can’t afford this. Hogwash. Here’s what a matrifocal culture would provide:

Universal Day Care and Pre-k. I hear that day care can cost as much or more than the monthly mortgage. Of course, no family is a nuclear island, and no woman should be asked to do all the free labor a modern wife is supposed to provide. There could be many hands helping to raise children, as there once were, before we were all cut off from one another and sequestered in separate stalls like livestock.

Free Public Education. Of course. Many countries provide this. It’s pretty simple. We didn’t have to turn them into social clubs with better facilities than a four-star hotel, because they compete with one another as corporations do. When I was a college kid, I could make my tuition to the University of Massachusetts with a summer job. A person could graduate with no debt, or very little, until Reagan came along and told us that the government should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.

Universal Pensions. Let’s cut the relationship between working and the right to live. If you worked your whole life in unpaid labor, also known as motherhood, you should get a pension. If you worked your whole life as an unrecognized artist, same. What if arts and education supported each other without the burden of red tape? What if the struggling poet were a part-time aid in your high schooler’s English class a few days a week as part of her grant? Or the muralist was helping the art teacher. Yes, in grandmother reality, we have art teachers. What if the tedious patchwork of 501(c)(3)s were dissolved and teachers could work directly with artists? Honestly, a better world is easier in so many ways. We just have to remove the jaundiced eye that thinks everyone is trying to get away with something. That’s projection.

Universal Health Care. Obviously. Including complete reproductive rights over one’s own body. Health care doesn’t have to be tied to work. One of the perversions of patriarchal culture is that a person’s right to live is contingent upon whether or not they work. Because I had a good union my whole working life, I had good health insurance - until I retired. Now, I have to pay for Medicare. That’s $200 a month for my husband and me - each. Not only has my income been reduced by a third, but my expenses have increased. All because I’m no longer working to stay alive. If we had universal health care, we could also have rural hospitals that provide a good living to people who don’t want to live in cities. On top of this, we could have much better maternity outcomes (the country of family values is a terrible place to have a baby), and we could add postpartum support and maternity and paternity leave that really help families bond. In a matrifocal culture, there is more to us than work, and more important things than shareholder profit - especially in health care. Just ask Luigi Mangione. In fact, the system already exists. Just give everyone the same health coverage that Marjorie Taylor Green will enjoy for the rest of her life after five paltry years of work - if you can call what she did work.

A robust system for mental health. Think of all the mental health professionals trying to float their own boats. I know so many who couldn’t afford the freelance helper lifestyle and gave up. We’re going to need all of them as we wean off patriarchal shame as a means of raising and controlling men and women. Recovery Road is long and full of pilgrims.

Just look at the mental health crisis we already have. Our culture is gunning for us. We lead the world in gun violence, and that isn’t just because our politicians have refused to enact the common-sense gun laws that most of us want. No. The right is correct when they say: Guns don’t kill; people do. That phrase demonstrates that we have one of the sickest patriarchal cultures in the world. Obviously, that’s true. We won’t even change when little children are shot in their classrooms. It’s a domestic violence crisis that comes right out of white homes. If you are a fucking bitch, you deserve to die. Because our patriarchal culture values violent men but doesn’t value women, we allow all the reporting on partner violence to be chaotic when it exists, so no one really knows there’s a threat until someone is dead. Instead of “Oh, well,” grandmothers would make it, “Oh, no. You can’t have a gun.” And then that man could pack his bags for a pilgrimage down Recovery Road.

And don’t rear up in fake helplessness over the Second Amendment. The Constitution didn’t rule out common sense; gun lobbyists did. They tortured that text into pretzels so they could ignore the words “well-regulated.”

Ending state-sanctioned corruption. If there was ever a system built for corruption, it’s the lobby system. We have almost no need for what they do. And there are many better ways for people to advocate for change. This leads me to other hallowed institutions of corruption that grandmothers would do away with. For some reason, bribery is against the law, but even when officials are caught taking 50k in a paper sack for favors, it’s not prosecuted. I could cite sources here, but I bet you know. Also, grandmothers would never allow politicians to buy and sell stocks. Every time Trump says “tariffs,” an insider-angel gets their wings.

PACs and dark money in politics. When our Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United (for corporate political speech) and then Janus (against unions having the same), it delivered a one-two punch to fair elections and signaled unmistakably that our Supreme Court was captured by billionaires. Of course, the Supremes have always been a tool of the wealthy, but around 2010, they stopped caring who saw. All political campaigns can be publicly funded. Many countries do this well. We could also limit how long campaigns can operate. Can you imagine a world in which politics doesn’t command every waking minute of your life? I’m old enough to remember it.

Just an aside, it’s been proven now that foreign governments have contributed to political campaigns in the U.S. You know who taught me that? Jeffrey Epstein. He showed Russia how to create media companies to funnel money because their umbrellas protected them from revealing their sources. So, out with all that. Only public money and only 6 months of campaigning. We deserve the opportunity to focus on life, not politics. We have the right to let our nervous systems, especially our collective ones, decompress.

Mail-in Voting. We all know our tech systems are vulnerable to satellite hacking. There’s mounting evidence that’s already been done, and then improved upon. Every state should turn to mail-in paper ballots with shorter windows for voting, and longer windows to count and recount if necessary. It’s simpler than figuring out if Schrodinger’s cat stole an election. Eighteen states already do this without incident. So, why does Trump insist on ending mail-in ballots and moving to a system where the federal government runs elections? Hmmmmm. My granny senses are tingling.

Guardrails. And now, because grandmothers know who did what just by looking into everyone’s eyes, we need enforcement with teeth. My grandmother used to say she could tell who was lying because she could see a red light in your pupil. I believed her because it was true. Not the red light part, but the seeing part. She always knew.

No more honor system built for gentlemen who have none. No more Electoral College or any other abomination that can be manipulated to create minority rule - which is what we have now. Just look at what North Carolina did to their democratically elected Governor, Attorney General, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Lieutenant Governor. They effectively invalidated their citizens’ votes. That’s flagrant. The grandmothers know that’s cheating. A kindergartener would know that’s cheating. The Supreme Court’s emergency docket and its shadow docket are routinely used for cheating, too. In any case, 1 in 3 rulings by courts are simply ignored by this administration. There’s a strong whiff of treason in the air, but nothing happens. Why? No enforcement mechanism. Our whole government was basically a gentlemen’s agreement. So, we need laws with teeth.

Accountability. Grandmothers know that a grandson with no accountability only grows up to become a malignant narcissist who hurts people for pleasure. And here, I’m talking about every pedophile who raped children through the Epstein trafficking ring, and all the other rings we’ve never heard of. People who abuse power to feed their addiction to hoarding wealth and avoiding accountability. Grandmother can see into your souls. It’s not good for the people, and it’s not good for the grandson. Just look at the warped personalities who are running things now. No grandmother worthy of her wrinkles would allow any of these people to lead a dog, let alone a country.

But we live in a death-phobic culture that hates women and thinks it can own life by owning every single thing. Let the absurdity of that sink in. Now, they’ve decided that everything we need to live should be a subscription. Corporations are buying all the starter homes, putting homeownership out of reach for most. They want education to be a subscription, too. Because, you know, it’s become so expensive. Everything is becoming Netflix. And we’re just supposed to pay and pay while they frolic on the high seas in gigayachts - with service vessels.

But we don’t have to allow this. We can have nice things. We just have to know we want them and insist.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, please restack with a comment; it would be friendly. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. You can’t imagine how much it means. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.