The problem with having some knowledge of history is that it makes it easy to see just how much of a wuss you are. Over the past two months in Massachusetts, the only thing that has been particularly painful for me has been the separation from T. Two months, mind you...and that’s with visits home every two weeks, email and phone calls every day.
I have a cousin-in-law whose husband is an Army Captain stationed in Korea, leaving her alone with their infant and two small girls. They’ve been apart about as long as we have, but I doubt they’ve seen each other since he left. They were hoping the family could join him but now it looks unlikely, so that they will probably be apart for several more months until he can be posted elsewhere. As an Air Force brat, though, she takes this all in stride, a normal fact of life.
Even they have email and occasional phone calls, though. He can travel home to her faster than John Adams could have reached Abigail, in 1776 when they were apart for months while he urged independence from England and she ran the farm. They could and did write every day and the little bit I’ve heard from their letters ("I live like a nun in an abbey, solitary, celibate...I hate it") convinces me that in this, if nothing else, Adams achieved greatness. He loved a woman as a person and a partner, not an adjunct to himself, a pet, or a convenience, not as a societal should-do or a romantic illusion. Conversely, of course, for Abigail. I haven’t seen many unions that looked like "the marriage of true minds"; I know of some, and have seen enough in fiction to convince me their authors knew whereof they wrote. I think the Adamses had one, and those long separations must have been excruciating.
This also gives me a new perspective on all those old ballads about the fair maid faithful to her lover, away at sea for 7 years. Likely she’d have had a place in her community and an extended support system most of us don’t have now, but still, seven years apart with no reunions or even letters doesn’t strike me as the best basis for a relationship.
Given the restrictions placed on young women in some past societies, though, I suppose a separation and the ensuing letters might have been a better way to get to know each other (as in Little Women, when Jo and Prof. Bhaer are separated after their engagement: "For a year Jo and her Professor worked and waited, hoped and loved, met occasionally, and wrote such voluminous letters that the rise in the price of paper was accounted for"). If Alcott and her contemporaries are accurate, long separations were not uncommon, though transportation by train must have helped shorten them. Still, no phones, no airplanes, no email. And, of course, the medical knowledge of the time meant that the Long Separation could come without warning, before the lover could come home.
Thank goodness they sent me here with a laptop, and an internet connection. My listgroups and my email have been a lifeline, and I should probably say so to the people involved. Still, satisfying as it is to at least be talking to interesting people and people who care, their ghostly presence on the other end of a phone cable is a modern pleasure, and doesn’t satisfy on the primal levels of physical presence, having touch and smell, sound and taste and vision all at once. Modern wuss or no, I will be glad, glad, GLAD when "my love is in my arms, and I in my bed again".
Posted by dichroic at March 13, 2001 10:17 PM