Notes from Maine - 2021/11/21

I’m good in a crisis. The most recent example I can give was from last summer. My nephew and I were driving Dad’s Polaris (it’s like a rugged golf cart) through the woods when the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor. While barely keeping us on the trail, I stood on the brakes and calmly reached down to shut the engine off. The brakes didn’t do a thing. Turning the key stopped us. 

Maybe that doesn’t really qualify as a crisis, but I think it illustrates my point.

Why am I being defensive about my ability to handle myself?

Because when the crisis is over, I am pretty emotional. When I was young, the other kids had a name for it… What was it? Oh, right, Crybaby. 

A sad book, movie, or song can stab me right in the heart. The British signs from just before the war, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” feel like an indictment of my less-than-stiff upper lip. Those signs were produced by the Ministry of Information (awesome name) and they were meant to strengthen morale and combat hysteria that might result from wartime disaster. 

Hysteria.

The term ”hysteria” was a diagnosis of a state of ungovernable emotions. The word itself means, roughly, from the womb. All these ”feminine” emotions were caused by a basic anatomical defect. It’s okay, ladies, you can’t help it. Sometimes, a hysterectomy was prescribed to alleviate the issue.

What was my point? I swear I had one.

My sister hates it when things happen on accident. If that last sentence makes you want to rip my fingers off, it’s probably because you were born before 1995. Younger people tend to say, “on accident,” and older people say, “by accident.” This whole debate could be eliminated by the word “accidentally,” as my sister often tells her son.

To me, “on accident,” has a softer implication of blame. When someone says, “I don’t know what happened to the window—it happened by accident,” I take that to mean that they broke the window but they didn’t mean to.

If someone says, “It happened on accident,” I take that to mean that they broke the window but they really don’t want to take the blame. 

Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to think that younger people want to distance themselves (prepositionally) from implication. It’s a very subtle shift and maybe it has nothing to do with anything. I just like looking for places where language can shape the way we feel about things.

“It broke,” versus, “I broke it.”

People see emotions as a weakness so they label it as a feminine issue, assign it to a female body part, and call it a disease. 

I remembered my point!

There’s such a thing as a “hysterical pregnancy.” I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The person in question has the symptoms of pregnancy but they’re not pregnant. Given the origin of the word “hysterical” you might think that all pregnancies were hysterical…

I don’t talk about it much because I don’t want to jinx things, but I’m waiting until Tuesday to find out if my friend Maybelle is actually pregnant or just hysterically pregnant. It would be pretty hysterical, actually. 

Maybelle is a horse, by the way. 

When she came here a year ago, there was some question as to whether or not she was already pregnant. I would have to say no, based on the fact that she never gave birth. But, recently, she started developing all the symptoms once more. That leads to the question of this possibly being a hysterical situation.

I gathered both horses (Maybelle and Earl) and asked them pointedly if either of them had any information about why Maybelle appears to be pregnant. I didn’t get any answers, of course, of course. But I did get a general sense that if she is actually pregnant, it happened on accident.