I was visiting Julie Pippert at The Artful Flower last Friday and caught the hump day topic before the fact for a change and thought I might give it a go. I don’t do MEME type stuff generally because I am an all-about-me kind of blogger, but I loved the topic. Rules. And this is what Julie has to say about it in the form of a prompt:

Notes: Next week’s Hump Day Hmmm. Mamma Loves suggested “The Rules.” Call them rules, call them mores, or maybe even call them ethics. In general, we all understand there are certain rules and most of us try to follow them. Something to do with being good. But…are we all playing by the same rules? Do we all have to answer to the same rules? Are the rules applied equitably, and enforced equitably? Are we even all playing the same game? Are you a rule follower? You tell me.

Growing up Catholic, and a girl (the two most incompatible things ever by the way), life was an onslaught of “thou shalt not’s” and double standards. There was one set of rules for boys and another for girls, and the girls’ rules always sucked in a big way by comparison. Life if you were male was like five on five full-court, but if female it was six player. Three on three. Half-court only. You were restricted to either shooting or blocking the shot, and if that wasn’t binding in a Chinese shoe kind of way, there was that little two-dribble and pass thing. Boys could be altar-servers. Girls were lucky if they were allowed to step foot on the altar to help clean it. Boys were priests and ran the parish while girls were the nuns who took orders and did the heavy lifting. Boys were husbands and heads of household. Girls were fashioned from their ribs to be Stepford Wives their (junior) partners aka wife. When I was 8 I wanted to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but I was told I couldn’t because I was a girl. When I was 9, I wanted to be a priest and was offered the nunnery. When I was 10, I wanted to write and was told I wasn’t any good. I equated that with being a girl and laid low for a good deal of my life thereafter.

Rules were woven into the essence of my being from before conscious memory, but I never willingly followed. I conscientiously objected. Quietly. Passively. Aggressively. I quit the basketball team in grade 10. It wasn’t really basketball anyway if you couldn’t run the court. I stopped going to confession that year too. If God could hear my prayers, couldn’t he hear my sins straight from my mouth as well?

In school, high school and university, I learned that rules were more guidelines than anything else, and the more talented you were the less they applied to you. This was reinforced by my years as a teacher. If I got the job done, it didn’t matter if I was a team player or a maverick. Results were everything. Who you knew mattered – a lot. The objector in me began to wonder who had come up with this neat little scam called “the rules” because they sure didn’t apply equally or sometimes even at all.

I am not a rules girl. I don’t get the Sex in the City approach to love. I am not Gordon Gecko enough to crave out a slice of the American Dream for myself and my family. I was too busy surviving while my first husband died slowly in plain view to coif our suburban yard or join the right play groups or volunteer at the church. There was always something more important to do than identify the feet I should have been annointing with perfumed oils and drying with the long tresses of my hair. Life would have been easier if I had colored inside the prescribed lines and known which way the wind was blowing and who was releasing all that hot air in the first place.

When I became a widow I was blithely unaware of the fact that there were more “rules” waiting for me although surely the one time in your life you need a little wiggle room wouldn’t be the time to slam the door behind you, right? I didn’t know a single widow under the age of 55 but when I went looking for my “own kind” I thought I would find comraderie and found instead a curious culture with a shitload of rules. It was like being back in Sr. Marilyn’s homeroom at Resurrection Grade School in 1976. That inner passive aggressive middle-schooler is never hard for me to locate and channel, and I did what I always do when confronted with a rigged game.

I understand the reason for law and societal norms. They are necessary because so many of us would rather be told what to do than to think for ourselves. The civilization that results is patchy at times but works, more or less. When I think of rules however, the aforementioned laws and norms is not what comes to mind. Rules are the norms within norms. The cliches and gangs that spring up in the gaps like weeds in a cracked cement driveway.