A Longing for Justice: In a Patriarchal Society

By Amy Croft

Amy Croft writes about her complicated childhood and fraught adulthood to bring to life the cultural chains operating in all aspects of the patriarchal society. She understands the pressures on women having worked in social services for the majority of her working life, and hopes that her story will encourage women to find their way out of outmoded patriarchal arenas and move toward a more matriarchal vision.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982290269

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Copyright © 2021 Amy Croft.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-9027-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9026-9 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:  05/13/2021

Fear makes the Wolf bigger than he is.

To my children, you, and yours, will always have a special place in my heart.

To my partner, Chas, life changed for the better when you walked into my life and showed me what mankind could, and should, mean.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 A Fractured Life in the Making

Chapter 2 Dawning of Awareness

Chapter 3 Life Dilemmas

Chapter 4 Ordeals of Teenage Discovery

Chapter 5 Working Girl

Chapter 6 Intimacy versus Isolation

Chapter 7 Marriage and Babies

Chapter 8 Greater Challenges Ahead

Chapter 9 Injustice—The Hard Facts of Life

Chapter 10 Day of Reckoning

Chapter 11 The Road to Redemption

Chapter 12 Time for Me

Chapter 13 Meeting My Long-Lost Daughter

Chapter 14 Friendship

Chapter 15 Pearls of Wisdom

About the Author

Resources

Notes

Preface

This is the story of my life; my lessons in reality. The events described in A Longing for Justice happened to me. I have agonized over writing my story, wondering if I was putting it into the right context with a right-minded intent. I started writing and found my words. I decided to tell it like it was, and is, for me. The reason for the trauma I experienced, as described herein, is encapsulated in one word: patriarchy. What an impact this beast has made on my life. And not only my life but also on the lives of women across the nations of the world. For some it is an evil beast. If you were to open this beast up and take away its control, dominance, and power, you would find a rather empty vessel. I can see the breadth and width of it, but in its depths and at its heart, I find no profound substance. It is time now to reveal the impact patriarchy has had on me, and many others. I am glad I finally took the bull by the horns and shared my story. I notice many women are sharing their own stories these days, and it’s about time. My journey’s been hard for me, personally—but perhaps fighting for justice is better than longing for it. At the end of the day, integrity always beats despair.

CHAPTER 1

A Fractured Life in the Making

Having lived in a patriarchal society, my aim is to highlight the advantages of being able to move through trauma to a really good space in your life. But first, I will explain the reason for the trauma I experienced. This explanation encapsulates how patriarchal institutions worked on me throughout my life and reveals how dangerous these institutions are for our health and wellbeing. I believe that if you were to take away the patriarchy’s power and control, you could put in its place a much more nurturing matriarchal influence and a more equitable society. There is a lot of toxic masculinity operating out there.

This is the story of my life. Everyone has one! I began writing A Longing for Justice a couple of years ago, well before COVID-19 appeared. It wasn’t an easy write. I had so much to say, but I when I started, I didn’t know how to put it all in a context that would reach people as I intended. It seemed very important to reach people with right-minded intent regarding change because, having been on the sharp end of this particular patriarchal knife, I can tell you that it is not a comfortable place to be. It nearly ended my life. However, I have now had enough of seeing, hearing, and dealing with the pain and anguish which patriarchy has brought to our doors like the Big Bad Wolf. But this is no wolf. It is much more dangerous and insidious that a wolf: it is a beast that seems unstoppable. Its modus operandi needs to be examined so we can reveal the breadth, width, and depth of it. I can see the breadth and width of it, having lived and worked with it for so long, and I have come to believe there is not much depth to it in terms of profound substance. It has been allowed too much power, too much leeway, and too much attention, and it has become a loathsome monster to women and children (and to many men as well).

There is a particular form of patriarchy—male control and domination over everyone else—which assumes many guises to get what it wants. It is present in just about every institution, organization, system, and society around the world. The perils of the patriarchy know no bounds. The world is run mainly by certain types of men who seek power and control over others, especially over women and children. This is not a recent phenomenon. If you look through the annals of history, you will see what this beast has inflicted on the female gender since day dot. I don’t know about you, but I am sick of it to the depths of my being. By that I mean the patriarchal bullying and the misogynistic need for control and domination over the female sex. Since the 1950s, I have been examining my opinions about it and what it represents in every society and era. It is far-reaching and corrupt.

This is the story of my own personal encounters with the patriarchy and the impact it has made on my life. What happened to me was bad enough, but there are others experiencing much worse. This need for control and dominance is not new, but it is being exposed more often in this era because it is ramping up its nefarious intent against us. All of us have read on the internet or in papers, or viewed on television, the vile deeds perpetrated against women and children. Just about every newspaper I have read in recent years has something concerning the amount and level of abuse aimed at women for some perceived reason or other. For years, women and children have been abused and murdered in our society and around the world by insecure, maladjusted males bearing grudges of some sort against people who do not share their views and beliefs. Such men have turned on their partners, wives, and unfortunately, their children. These males have stalked, abused, and tortured their victims for years in some cases. Why is this so? And how can we stop it? This beast makes a significant impact on all our lives because no woman or man can turn a blind eye to it—not even those who think it cannot affect them. Our lives and our children’s lives are at great risk. Can we keep turning our eyes and ears away from this type of control and domination? The impact is great, even if there is no one in your family who has been directly affected you know of people who are, and we’d be wise to listen to what so many women are saying now.

We need to have the backs of our fellow women and children in our families and communities. We must support vulnerable children, women, and men we pass on the street. We must support them in every single way. Good men take heed; we need you to stand up for us now. This beast is a constant amongst us.

A Longing for Justice is about ripping the fabric of the patriarchy apart and seeing what can be done about the great impact it has made on our lives. This story starts at birth, the point at which we all carry our DNA and our characteristics into our new post-womb lives. This is the point at which our infant dependency starts and we begin bonding with our primary caregivers, usually loving parents, whom we look to for our most basic of needs and emotional security. If this attachment is secure, we feel safe and are able to explore the world around us without feeling abandoned when our primary carers are not able to. However, if the attachment is not secure or constant, we may feel very insecure, which may affect the normal healthy bonds of parent-child relationships, leading to significant problems including abandonment. This latter description depicts my start in life because of my birth circumstances.

I am Amy Croft. This name is a pseudonym. All names and places in this book have been changed to protect people’s privacy, including my own. My aim is not to ‘out’ people unnecessarily but to give my perspective of what happened to me in a patriarchal world and how it affected me, my children, my parents, my partners, and so many others. This story is based on my own personal memories and recollections. It is my account. I have lived a lifetime with my issues, and now, without too much emotion clouding my judgement, I feel I can tell my story objectively. We women, and many men too, all have stories to tell. I cannot leave the male sex out of this story because many of them have been failed and felled by unrealistic society expectations—particularly by patriarchal religious, and other institutions which forced compliance.

In this first book, my purpose is to seek clarity, for myself and my fellow women, about why so many of us experience these life fractures. Why do some events in a person’s life unfold in a way that causes much damage to the psyche and the spirit? How do we get beyond that and to a place of healing and respect for ourselves? I wish to relay to you what worked for me and may work for others too. In my quest, I found I could have a meaningful life. It has taken a long time, and it has been a fraught journey, but I have to say that the fundamental elements of ‘being human’ on this planet are basically the same, no matter what era you live in, or what your gender, ethnicity, or age is.

Most of us have a need for love, respect, and nurturing, and most of us know right from wrong. We tend to react and respond in core similar ways, even when we are generations apart. We have been, and still are to a large extent, living within a patriarchal society, whatever form it takes. For me, and for many of my readers no doubt, it has also been a most damaging phenomenon.

It is this which propels me to speak out, in the hope that you, my fellow women, and males, too, who have been abused by these same patriarchal systems, will understand that I have your best interests at heart, seeking to change systems that oppress us. Know that I care about what has happened to you and I wish for a better life and future for you. This is achievable, but things have to change.

Anxiety and depression were serious issues during my childhood, and I carried them with me into adulthood. I could not detach from anxiety and depression. Nor could I avoid, deny, go around, or hide from their grip on me. I was forced to confront them in the end. It wasn’t pretty—no getting around that! I just wanted to be normal, but then again, what’s normal? We know the word but can’t often define it. It can be slippery and tricky at the best of times. I have difficulty with my normal even now. It remains somewhat elusive, tricky to pin down. My normal these days is feeling comfortable with my self.

I was an only child. My mother, Mae, was nearly forty-six years of age at my birth, and my father, Eric, was nearly fifty years of age. I was referred to as a change of life baby, and at the time it was considered unusual to have a firstborn child at their age—though, of course, things have changed now with better medical facilities and techniques. My mother was perimenopausal when she birthed me. I was birthed naturally, but with some complications. My entry into the world was fraught with high emotion. My presence in my parents’ lives was a big surprise. I was a few weeks premature and was taken straight to an ICU incubator, suffering breathing difficulties. Not much heavier than four pounds in weight, I had an underdeveloped lung capacity. I didn’t go home from hospital with my mother, because I developed a nasty skin condition called eczema over my body and a range of allergies associated with respiratory issues. My parents had a farm outside a metropolitan area, and it was hard for them to visit me in the city, as my father had to manage his farm. My mother didn’t know anyone with whom she could stay in the city. There was no Ronald McDonald House accommodation in those days, and transport systems were thin on the ground. This separation from my mother meant that I could not be breastfed. Worse, I could not be touched or cuddled, as there were weeping rashes all over my body, which meant I was pretty isolated. Though my start in life was not as bad as some, obviously being in isolation with no close contact with a loving parent is not an ideal situation for an infant who needs to bond through touch and to see a loving mother’s face and feel a loving father’s presence.

My breathing improved, and although the eczema did not settle down for a couple of years (and often plagued me for decades afterwards), I was able to be taken home a month or so later, the first time my parents got to touch me and hold me for short periods of time. There were many foods I could not eat as I progressed to solids, as most foods would cause a flare-up of my eczema and an increase in my breathing difficulties. I was at times tied to the cot to prevent me from scratching my eczema sores. No little bub would be happy about not being able to move nor to scratch the incessant nasty itch that was under the skin. This predicament, and others, prevented me from forming a trusting relationship with my mother, which laid the foundation for a fractured relationship that would last a lifetime—unfortunately for us both.

A loving mother-child relationship is essential for a baby’s understanding of nurture. It eclipses all other relationships in childhood. It is of vital importance. If this link is severed, then the baby may develop a sense of abandonment, which can have life-lasting implications on the child’s sense of self or lack thereof. It seems obvious that I would have associated touch with something undesirable under the circumstances, causing some psychological, as well as physical, withdrawal from my mother, which was neither her fault nor mine.

The relationship between my mother and me never got off the ground, and in fact it got much worse over the years. Had we done something somewhere along the line, for example, if we had paused and tried to understand each other, we might have succeeded at becoming closer, but it never happened. I wished I knew how to fix it, but I was a mere child and didn’t have the skills to do so. This is the thing about life: so many things are out of our control, and it is the way we deal with this fact that makes us or breaks us in the end.

My father had been born into a farming and gardening family who were definitely in the working-class bracket, and my mother had been born into a rather middle-class bracket with her academic family. Her father was a headmaster. She and her siblings, who went on to become teachers in various schools, graduated at the age of fifteen years. My parents carried the burdens of their lives into their relationship.

My parents were as different as chalk and cheese in terms of character and personality, an attraction of opposites. They had a lot of disagreements, mainly about me—loud, prolonged arguments about anything and everything, and not an agreement to be found. They only stopped when my father pounded his fist on the table and said, That’s enough, Maeve! and because he was the head of the family (it was imperative in those times to regard the man as such), it was enough, and she shut up! Until next time.

My father’s farm went bust in a prolonged drought, and subsequently he obtained employment with some government department in the city, where we went to live. I never knew what he actually did, though he had many skills. What he did at home whilst I was growing up was to create a mass of colourful gardens and