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“One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!” “Hell no, we won’t go!” “Make love, not war!” —Slogans used by Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s and 1970s Susan Patient On 2 September 1969, as young Americans and students slated for draft into the United States armed forces were questioning authority and protesting the Vietnam war, the real me who had remained divided by an inner iron curtain since childhood erupted in protest as well. My protest probably originated in the legacy of repressed 1840s Irish Potato Famine rage that had gone unchecked through generations of my maternal and paternal lines. My own outcry gained my attention in the form of a psychotic break three years after the birth of my fourth child in four years. Like citizens who are given the facts of wars that are controlled, manipulated , and interpreted by political, industrial, and media powers, I spent years accepting the officially provided interpretations of my 1960s and 1970s experiences , for lack of other sources of information. However, when the courage emerged to commit to changing my story and the wisdom grew to see how psychic wars are solely lost or won on truth, I embraced a thirty-year war between my “good” patriarchal woman self and 25 2 Protests the real me she silenced. The spoils of that war were the awakening of a new feminine consciousness and abilities to feel, to nurture, and to create from the core of my being. As the conscious understanding of my story grew, I began seeing my hospital experiences through different eyes. What follows is an account of the events and official interpretations as they unfolded in the era of protests. I was thirty-five years old at the time of the break and for the prior eight years had been isolated in Etobicoke, a Toronto suburb, while discovering my sexuality, raising children, and lending support to my husband’s career. Birth Control Issue My first brief and guilt-ridden attempt at taking the religiously forbidden birth control pill lasted several months following the birth of my third child. After my fourth child was born,I stayed on the pill for three years.By the fourth pregnancy ,our ability to afford live-in help allowed us to begin taking evening walks together. The added freedom and routine physical exercise allowed me to feel better at the end of the fourth pregnancy than I did at its beginning. Live-in help also enabled me to begin the study of art one day a week as soon as our fourth child was off his night feedings. Although I was free to garden and I enjoyed doing so, my husband, like his father with his mother, forbade home decoration as a needless frill. My husband’s attitude so thwarted my need to create beauty that his control forced my buried artistic spirit to the surface. The Three Schools of Art,where I studied,was on Markham Street,a trendy, boutique-filled street in Toronto’s Annex. My one day a week at art school filled me with energy and contentment. At home, one side of the kitchen counter began to hold baby foods and the other my paints and brushes. I expressed with growing skill and abandon and enjoyed the company of artists for the next the three years. By my third year on the pill, the freedom to enjoy my children, to study art, as well as to cook and to meet new artist friends could no longer mask the lessening of my husband’s affections when I was not pregnant. I wanted to please him,missed his affection,and felt guilty about being on the pill.However, because I was too Catholic to consider therapy to help me deal with these dif- ficulties and too exhausted to face another pregnancy, I shrunk my unconscious dilemma to an action I could cope with at the time. I went to a Catholic retreat to look for a loophole that would allow me to continue using the birth control pill. I held the considerable inner conflict I brought to the retreat in a slender coltish body. I was slim, but heavy with fatigue from a bout of infectious mononucleosis I’d contacted in July 1963 between the second and third child, and from an exhaustion that built between the births of my third and fourth 26 Protests [3.142.200.226] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 22:11...

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