Ponderings

When the nights are restless and I begin channeling Goldilocks in search of sleep, I sometimes find myself on the family room couch. Last night was such a night and as I drifted off into long awaited slumber, the dog was nearby making sleeping dog noises in her box. The clink of the metal crate as she shifted in her sleep was the only sound in the otherwise quiet house.

As I consider my dog’s comfortable sleep in a wire cage, I confess confusion. Personally I find dog crates (the euphemism for cages) to be anathema and I had no intention of ever having one of those heartless contraptions in my house.

When our beloved Evie came to live with us several Christmas’ ago, I set up a bed of blankets on the floor beside my own assuming that she would sleep blissfully alongside her new people. Wrong.
As soon as she heard the sounds of her new people sleeping, she explored the bedrooms in search of a place to relieve herself. Not a good first night. When my son awoke on the second morning, it was to the sight of prized toys mangled by Evie’s teething. Our day time hours spent with Evie were so rich we might have been able to overlook the nighttime indiscretions, except that her indiscretions were creeping into the daytime. Any stray toy was an invitation to chew and when she started chewing on my furniture I cried foul.

Even so, when the kids and I trudged through Petsmart looking at crates, Evie in tow, I knew that I was a dog-mother failure.

Despite their claims to the contrary, these contraptions are not very user friendly. Once assembled, we turned our attention to the accompanying DVD, “Crating Your Dog 101”. We were skeptical as the talking heads assured us of how happy our Evie would be in her new ‘home’, but we listened impassively as they described dog nature. We were not convinced that dogs instinctively need the safety of defined perimeters, but our alternatives were few. Stubbornly we listened on. By the end of the video, we realized that we had lost track of Evie and quickly scanned the room. Evie had already crawled into the awaiting crate and fallen asleep.

Clearly Evie knew and wanted the comfort of ‘crate life’. Because she had been an abandoned dog, we knew nothing about her patterns and preferences. All the while we thought we were honoring here with the run of the house, she was needing the security of a box. Our transference of our values came at the cost of her sense of safety.

As I roam the house in the quiet of the night, searching for the perfect sleeping space, am I too searching for the perimeters? Is it a definition, a boundary that I seek?

Perhaps at the heart of our cultures wars is a yearning for definition, for boundary. Buried beneath the bitter words about abortion, homosexuality, and even our war making is a rusty crate that once defined our culture. Patriarchy was the frame by which we understood ourselves in relationship, though at times limiting it also offered a measure of comfort. Patriarchy provided definitions of gender roles and gave structure to what we call nuclear families but its influence far exceeded our individual lives. Patriarchy helped to define hierarchies among groups of people and even the created world, with animals and the earth itself. In its crudest sense, patriarchy offers the domino scenario where the angry man grumbles at wife who yells at child who hits the dog. The more sinister embodiments of patriarchy lead us through the living hells of the Salem Witch Trials of Colonial America and the Middle Passage of the 19th century, and land us in the modern era of gay bashing finally brought to light in the tragic murder of Matthew Sheppard. Despite the ugly underbelly, however, patriarchy functioned to provide structure and thereby comfort for centuries of western humanity.

In this new millennium we are witnessing a profound challenge to patriarchy and the result is loud saber rattling. Our children and now theirs are simply refusing to accept the definitions of gender and orientation and race that enabled us to identify the perimeters of our world order. Androgyny is a norm and the ethnic boxes on our forms have become irrelevant. Although we certainly share archetypal features with our canine friends, among them our innate desire for definition, humanity can no longer so neatly collapse into the categories and boxes upon which we once depended.

Inasmuch as our culture wars reveal the death rattle of patriarchy, perhaps we can celebrate even the sharp edges. For out of the ashes, new life will rise. In the meantime, we can rejoice that our crates are no longer locked.