Traditional Insanity and the Insanity of Tradition

Once again, a woman has been convicted of insanity for killing her children. This time, she drowned each of them, one by one, in the bathtub. It is difficult to determine if these type killings are occurring more often or if it is simply that we hear of them more frequently. One thing we rarely hear, however, is anything about the husband’s complicity in the crime. Nor, do we ever hear anything about the possibility of society’s complicity.

The question that is never asked or answered in these proceedings is whether the woman was insane because she killed the children or if she was insane because she acquiesced in having them in the first place. Or, perhaps, was she insane because she got married? Far too often, otherwise normal people take the traditional road – the road laid out by parents, religious leaders, friends, the custom of the times or environment, or the accepted dictates of society even when that traditional road leads directly to disaster.

It is not easy to consciously stray from doing what’s expected. We’re taught all through our lives to respect authority, regardless of what defines that authority. We’re incessantly told to conform, not only through direct teachings and conversation by also through covert and subliminal messages. What’s expected gets translated into what’s right, although the right in these instances means only what we’ve been told.

Someone once coined the term ‘the Peter Pan Syndrome’ for men who refused to grow up. The women’s equality movement also suggested a ‘Cinderella syndrome’ for women who automatically believed the fairy tale that once her Prince had come, everyone lived happily ever after, but that epithet never quite caught on outside the realm of ‘radical’ feminism. We also need a pundit to provide a catchy name to the men who are entrenched in paternalism and the women who willingly succumb to walking two steps behind such men.

Lately, all the morality mavens who profess Christian values rather than personal values they actually live by have been loudly banging the jungle drum about the temerity of gays and lesbians who want to prove their humanity and love through a marriage to someone of the same sex. They are convinced that any deviation from the traditional bonds and shackles of marriage as they define it will destroy civilization. What they are incapable of recognizing, much less admitting, is that the ancient rationale for such tying together of two individual people has less validity than it once had. Supposedly procreation is still the primary purpose, but the world is no longer under populated and the expectation of early death through disease or accident is not so dire. Nor, in a modern world which does not kowtow to the dictates of royal bloodlines or peasant attributes, does a guarantee of virtue and purity assure that only those deemed fit to rule others have an obligation to reproduce themselves.

Rather than demanding that marriages be limited to one man and one woman, we should be questioning the institution of marriage itself. We should certainly be questioning why we continue to not only assume but demand that our children marry and have children in their turn. We continuously emphasize that legal, document strewn marriage is the only ‘right’ thing, and that only by having children can anyone, but particularly women, be fulfilled. Both of those dictates are lies that have been perpetuated since the idea first occurred to a scam artist who set himself up as the authority on how to live appropriately in order to put some money in his pocket for his personal revels the following Saturday night.
Formalized, church approved, paper documented marriages are not a natural state. Finding a mate is natural, and in some animal species adhering only to that mate is normal, but it is never imperative. Mankind’s attempt to make it so is only another attempt at total control. Some people should never marry, yet they can be completely happy and fulfilled in their single state, finding congenial discourse and companionship with others of like or similar mind, yet although the suggestion that one should always question authority while respecting it, rarely occurs to anyone when the issue is traditional marriage or the tradition of marriage.

Were marriage not difficult enough by itself, the couple is then expected to have children. Funny that parenthood is one of the few ‘commodities’ that arrives without a how-to manual. Funny also that so many men set themselves up as the most commanding of authorities on having children simply because they contribute one Olympic swim team caliber sperm with tunnel vision. Women, on the other hand, who must endure the limitations of gestation and the rigors and pain of birth as well as the primary care of the child for the next twenty years, simply accept such an expectation from others with little demur because she’s been conditioned to believe that such is her duty in life.

Should every woman avail herself of a couple gallons of icy cold water to throw in the faces of all those who traditionally diminish her value as a thinking, responsible person able to formulate and adhere to her own decisions about her married state and her body as incubator, there might be far fewer court verdicts of insanity because she murdered her children when her hopelessness was caused by being force fed traditions. Only then could we honestly treasure our children instead of using them as an excuse to enforce a unnatural state on adults unable to cope with such bliss.

In all these instances in which children die at the hands of parents, there were far more victims than those whose names were read into the court decree.