Author: Sharron Burnett

I suppose I would have to say that I am a quasi-feminist. Perhaps I understand the societal difficulties of being a woman from watching my mother attempt to shoulder the responsibilities of being the soul caretaker of our family during the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century. She had incredible duties thrust upon her in a time when society still clung to stereotypical ideas about the roles of men and women. She was unprepared for the challenge that my father’s death forced her to face, but with time she certainly did her best to keep our family moving forward even as roadblocks made her task harder than it should have been. I often marvel at her determination and see her as the first feminist that I ever knew.

Growing up without a father made me more acutely aware of the ability of women to get things done just as well as men. My mother understood that she was facing many societal roadblocks that included being paid far less for her work than many men would have been, but she nonetheless made things work for me and my brothers. I can’t recall her ever bemoaning her fate. She simply shouldered her responsibilities and managed to buy and pay for two houses and earn a college degree in the years after my father’s death. 

In spite of my mother’s accomplishments I saw that few men honored her with the respect that she deserved including her own brothers. It was women who best understood the trails she was blazing and the difficulties that she faced just because she was a woman. While she might have written a book on how to stretch a dollar until it squeaks, there were nonetheless people in her life who accused her of not knowing how to manage her finances simply because she had so little with which to work. When her mental illness made her life even more complex, somehow she continued to persevere and overcome the cycles of depression and mania that interrupted her ability to regularly work and she still accomplished as much or more than many men. 

My mother constantly reminded me that I was as capable as anyone, male or female. She urged me to be independent minded and to follow my own dreams. I never thought to ask for permission from my husband to continue my education with graduate studies. It never occurred to me that anyone other than myself should have any say in the route that I chose to follow. Luckily my husband had been influenced by his mother and grandmother who were both advocates for women’s rights in their own ways. I decided what kind of work I would do and where it take place. My consultation with my husband was meant to get his wisdom in making those choices, not his okay to do what I wanted to do. 

In a recent conversation a man noted that Kamala Harris has been an disappointment as Vice President of the United States. He commented that she has not performed well. When I asked him what she had done or not done he was only able to make vague comments about her personality. When I mentioned that the role of Vice President has always been somewhat lackluster he defended the men who had held those roles before Vice President Harris. When I asked who those men were he was unable to even put a name to all but a few of them. He ultimately agreed that the Vice Presidency does not always allow an individual to display his/her greatest strengths. Nonetheless, he believed that our current Vice President was particularly bad at the job without being to identify exactly what that meant. 

It reminded me of a moment in the new Barbie movie when America Ferrera’s character frets about the impossible demands that are placed on women, You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line…It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory!” 

I thought about some of the stones and arrows hurled at women who do attempt to take the reins and prove themselves as valuable to society as the men. I realized that we women still have a long way to go as long as there are those who critique females in ways that would never be applied to men. Hillary Clinton was too abrasive and aggressive according to many judgements, but a man behaving in the same manner is often considered to be a strong leader. 

My sister-in-law rose to management positions in her profession. She received numerous awards for her work with NASA. She is brilliant, and yet even within our family the admiration goes more often to my brother for his well earned  brilliance while hers is often overlooked. It took my grandson to see her greatness when he accompanied the two of them to the Texas Star Party, a yearly extravaganza of star gazing. It was my sister-in-law who showed him how to use the telescope and explained the mysteries of the heavens. She was the one who truly inspired him to become an aerospace engineer. He still admires his incredible uncle, but he saw that this woman was a marvel as well. 

I have watched women becoming more and more accepted during my lifetime, but all of us know that we have yet to find parity when it comes to earning the same level of respect as the male half of the world. The rooms of power are still mostly filled with men. We have yet to elect a woman to the office of President. We tend to critique women who do rise to powerful positions in ways that no man has had to endure. Being a woman is really difficult just as it is to be a man. I long for the day when we will accept that both of the sexes are equally competent and able to lead us. We should all remember that we are members of the same team.  

When I was a little girl in the late nineteen fifties I played with dolls with my girlfriends from the neighborhood. I had a Madame Alexander doll named Crissy that had lovely blonde curls and wore high heels. I created a world for Crissy using boxes and fabric to make furniture. I collected miniature items to use in decorating her little home that I set up on the driveway. My mother added to the fun by sewing new outfits for her.  I pretended that Crissy was an airline stewardess living in New York City.

I’ll never forget the day when my friend, Kathy, who lived across the street came to the pretend time with a brand new doll that she said had been named after her big sister, Barbara. The doll known as Barbie had a long blonde pony tail and looked way more glamorous and grown up than my Crissy. She even bore such a resemblance to Kathy’s sister that I believed that the Barbie doll was indeed inspired by the real life Barbara that I knew.  

I stayed loyal to my Crissy doll but also fell in love with Kathy’s Barbie. When I grew up and had two daughters of my own I could not wait for them to be old enough to graduate from baby dolls to one of the many versions of Barbie that had become a phenomenon. Before long Maryellen and Catherine too were playing make believe with their friends and the many different Barbies that they had collected. 

One Christmas my husband Mike built a house for the Barbies that had four rooms. I had a blast decorating each section with paint, wallpaper, carpet, flooring and rugs. I built furniture just as I had done as a little girl, but this time my creations were more substantial and sturdy. It was so exciting to see both girls screeching with joy on Christmas Day as they walked in to find a Barbie house unlike any other. 

I had also found a woman who sewed Barbie clothes that were quite fashionable. I purchased many different outfits that allowed the Barbies living in our home to work and play in style. The Barbies with their house and accessories kept both of my daughters and their friends entertained for hours on end. It gave me a warm feeling to watch the girls having the same kind of fun that I had enjoyed when I was also a little girl. I knew that pretend time was a kind of therapy for deciding what paths to follow in life. It is an acting out of our hopes and dreams

My mother-in-law often took the children on shopping adventures at the mall. They invariably returned with a new Barbie chosen for her hair or outfit or the profession that she portrayed. Before long we had a whole dormitory of Barbies who resided in the house that Mike built. They slept on the beds, lounged on the sofa and chairs or prepared food in the kitchen. Sometimes they went on trips in the car parked near their home. 

Once we purchased raffle tickets for some kind of charity that I can’t recall, but what I do remember is that in an unusual streak of good luck Mike won a prize, a Barbie Dream House. I thought our daughters were going to float up to the moon. Since the quarters in the hand crafted Barbie home was very crowded, the Dream House came in quite handy. Suddenly there was a village of Barbies under our roof. 

As always happens with children the years flew past and before long my Maryellen and Catherine were feeling grown up and had little interest in playing with their Barbie dolls. They were packed away and stored in the far reaches of the closet. The house that Mike built became a repository for books and other possessions, a shelf for storing things. It would not be until my granddaughter, Abby, showed an interest in such things that the house moved to her bedroom and was remodeled by Catherine with new paint and updated furniture. 

When I think of Barbie I smile because I remember first meeting that iconic doll when my friend, Kathy, introduced me to her. I can still hear the giggles and joy that Barbie brought to my Mayellen and Catherine and their friends Lynn and Missy and Lisa. I watched their Barbie dolls grow in stature and become confident enough to evolve as a role models willing to tackle the many challenges of being a woman in the make believe worlds that many little girls have always loved to create. Just as my Crissy doll had the courage to move to New York City from Texas to become an airline stewardess, my daughter’s Barbies became doctors, explorers, scientists. Over time Barbie showed little girls that they could be anything that they wished to be. 

When the Barbie movie opened I wanted to go see it with one of my daughters. Somehow it would not have been right to watch in with anyone else except maybe Kathy. Maryellen and I ended up attending a screening with my grandson, Eli, and his girlfriend, Elizabeth. Everyone wanted to dress for the occasion so we all wore pink. Elizabeth had her hair pulled back into a long pony tail and I was stunned at how much she resembled the Barbie that Kathy had shown me in the long ago. Eli good naturedly pulled off a very good impersonation of Ken. 

It was fun to see women and young girls of all ages flocking into the theater, taking photos of themselves, laughing and sharing their personal memories of playing with their Barbie dolls. Maryellen and I chuckled all the way through the movie as we remembered the many different Barbies that had once lived in our home. The film brought back so many precious memories of times that were so innocent and filled with joy. It also made us think about how far women have gone from that time in the nineteen fifties when women had a difficult time breaking the glass ceiling that hovered over their heads. So much has changed since I was a little girl and celebrating Barbie who went on the journey with me and all of the women who knew and loved her seemed liked the right thing to do. It’s amazing how much a little doll brought all of us together, different generations linked by the same kind of hopes and dreams. We’ve come a long long way!

The movie Oppenheimer is a master piece of screen writing, directing, acting and production. It well deserves to be one of the summer’s blockbusters, but it also opens up a kind of closeted fear of doomsday scenarios. The fact is that most of us who are known as Baby Boomers were not even alive when the bomb was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the existence of such a loomed large in our childhood psyches. 

While today’s children have fire drills, tornado drills and active shooter drills, we Boomers had bomb drills. When the signal came we were instructed by our teachers to duck under our desks and cover our heads with our arms. While that may sound ridiculous to the younger generation, the fear of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union was a very real specter that silently hovered over our daily lives. The fact that a tiny desk might actually save us in the event of a real attack on our country felt absurd even to those of use who respectfully practiced according to the commands of our teachers. Even as we obeyed knew that we were not really safe. 

Every Friday at noon the sound of an air raid horn boomed into the atmosphere reminding us that there were terrible dangers in the world that we hoped and prayed would never actually happen. Then when President Kennedy was President of the United States, we learned with all seriousness that the Soviet Union was attempting to install missiles in Cuba. For many days a disturbing shadow of terror gripped the nation as political heroes worked to keep us safe for at least one more moment. We escaped the worst back then, but somehow the terror of it all never completely left us. 

I remember laughing about Dr. Strangelove, a Cold War Era satirical movie that may have temporarily soothed our psyches, but deep down inside reminded us of the potential of world destruction that lingered over all of humankind. We understood the possibility, however remote, of a crazed leader setting a nuclear attack in motion. It was the dark threat that all of us knew, but attempted to push away from our consciousness.

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I understood even as a young person that our city is no doubt a likely target if any bad tyrant decided to use bombs. We have one of the busiest Ship Channels in the country. Our oil and gas production is important for the world. We are even home to NASA headquarters. As the fourth largest city in the United States we would potentially take one of the first hits. Such realization has always been sobering, even as the passing years helped us to more often than not forgot about the dangers that constantly hover in the universe.

When I became an adult I watched one of the early limited televisions series, The Day After. It depicted the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the United States through the eyes of a family in Kansas. It was horrifying in its depictions of what nuclear warfare can do. i remember thinking that if such a doomsday event were ever to occur I would want to die instantly rather than having to endure the slow death from radiation and the loss of loved ones and our entire way of life. 

In truth my mind has mostly sheltered me from thinking too much about the possibility of such an attack on our country. I have relied on the belief that nobody would ever want to trigger the chain reaction of destruction that would inevitably ensue if such an heinous event were ever to occur. Mostly I have believed that we are engaged in a mutual standoff in which no nation is willing to throw caution to the wind knowing that our bombs will react to their bombs without hesitation. The stalemate is a good thing but I shudder when I consider that it may not always hold.

The invention of weapons of mass destruction were bound to happen one way or another. Unleashing them for any reason will remain a topic of debate forevermore. We can only hope that the mutually enforced truce will remain steady and pray that no crazy authoritarian will ever dare to push the button that will forever change our planet. Even the man who lead the group that created the first atomic bomb understood the horror of what those scientists had unleashed on the order of the world. 

The Old Testament of the Bible tells us that in the beginning earth was a paradise where the first humans lived in harmony and peace. Adam and Eve had everything that they needed to be happy. The only thing that was taboo was to ingest the fruit from a particular tree. They opened the can of worms that haunt us all to this very day. Whether we view this story as a religious truth or a parable of human weakness, the moral is the same. We humans are capable of destruction.

We are all given a glorious opportunity to live in harmony but somehow we too often find ourselves wanting more than we need. Humans have to fight to control their jealous and angry instincts and somehow do not always behave in concert and compassion with one another. Thus dangers lurk around us with the granddaddy of them all being our capacity to create a means if of endangering everything and everyone that we know. Let us hope that caution will continue to prevail. Our capacity to harm has only grown with the introduction of hydrogen bombs more lethal than the first iterations of nuclear weapons. We must never again see the horrors of what Oppenheimer and his crew wrought. 

There was a time when summer vacation for students was actually a full three months long. In July kids were still flocking to the city park swimming pools on hot afternoons and reading whatever books suited their interests under the shade of trees of backyards. It would not be until mid-August that they might begin to consider doing some preparations for the impending school year. Mothers or fathers would take them to purchase new shoes, clothes or school uniforms. It would not be until after Labor Day that school bells would ring once again, but that was so long ago that few even remember such a time. 

I was a great student and I loved seeing friends that I had missed during our three month hiatus, but I always felt a bit sad to say goodbye to the lazy days of summer. I preferred sleeping late, playing games with my neighborhood buddies, existing without responsibilities and deadlines. I enjoyed the purposeless adventures of those long hot months when I was free and unrestrained. I often believed that I learned just as much from my own curriculum of exploration as within the confines of a particular scope and sequence of instruction. 

It usually only took a few days for me to become school ready again. I would adjust to the rigidity of the schedule and soon be back in top studying form. Little did I know back when I was a student that most of my adult life would be about conforming to the school calendar as well. In becoming a teacher I set the routines of my education bound journey in stone. To this very day I react to the changing seasons in concert with whatever the school calendar tells me to do.

Somewhere along the way to the present time summer vacation for students and teachers became shorter. The idea of being free for three whole months has been contracted with a creep toward starting earlier and earlier in August. I used to use my brother Pat’s birthday on August 17, as a gauge to remind me that it would soon be time to return to the classroom. This year the doors opened even before that date which meant that teachers had no doubt begun the planning and inservice time as soon as August rolled into view. 

There are myths about the life of teachers that still prevail. Aside from believing that only people who can’t do anything else decide to teach, there is the idea that teachers get paid for three months of vacation and that they work fewer hours than most. I have often been stunned when someone asks me what it was like to be home by three in the afternoon, something that never happened in all of my years of teaching. 

What I do know for certain is that teachers must fulfill a certain number of inservice hours to keep their certifications. Almost every teacher spends a week or two in June taking classes to keep up to speed with new theories and trends in pedagogy. If an individual wants to work with advanced placement programs the amount of required yearly education may extend into most of June. All of which means that teachers often have little more than a month of free time before they quietly report back to their schools in early August. 

As far as daily schedules go once school has resumed I can only speak to my own experiences, but on most days save for Fridays I was on campus no later than seven thirty in the morning and I rarely left before four thirty or five in the afternoon. In other words my work days were usually ten hours long, but that was only the amount of time that I was working at the school. There was never a day when I did not bring additional work home. Counting the hours that I spent grading papers and planning lessons I added another four hours to my daily routine. Sometimes I even took conference calls from parents on my home phone. In all honesty it was not unusual at all for me to devote seventy to eighty hours a week to the demands of being an educator. 

The truth is that I was not exceptional in my devotion to my job. In fact, I often felt that I might have done more, but I needed to devote time to my family as well. I drew the line when it came to encroachment on my personal life. I learned how to survive on very little sleep so that I might do most of my school work at our kitchen table while my daughters were doing their assignments. Then I would finish whatever I needed to do after they had gone to bed. The routine of the school months became so embedded in my psyche that I have found it difficult to totally relax when August rolls around. I feel the need to begin my marathon of educating young people again and again.

Now I have confined myself to homeschooling nine students in mathematics and tutoring others who need a little extra push in order to understand the concepts that they have learned at their schools. I begin organizing myself in mid-July on a smaller scale than before, but the planning takes the same time whether I am doing it for one student or one hundred.

I hear stories about the state of schools now that concern me. I read about the unhappiness of teachers who are all too often being misrepresented by political forces that actually know very little about the enormous efforts that educators make to help prepare our young to be the workers and leaders of tomorrow. You can believe me when I tell you that they do far more on a daily basis than can be measured by the first and last bells that ring on campus each day. In truth only those who can do the complex job are willing to return year after year. Neither the pay nor the respect they receive are the impetus that brings them back. Believe it or not, they do it for love.

For many this has been a summer of European vacations and blockbuster movies. It almost feels like old times have returned and yet nothing is really the same as it was back in the days of my youth or young adulthood. They are not the same as when my father-in-law was still a teenager on the day that I was born. Just as my grandfather always opined, life moves forward and changes just as it should. Still I have spent much of this summer looking back at my own story, remembering the people and events that most impacted me, reading books that track our shared world history. 

My tiny world is a microcosm of the global world , the story of humanity. Taken together our human journeys have all been leading to this moment in time. Our stories have been told in small gatherings with friends and family. They are the oral histories that reveal our innermost feelings. We hear the story of humanity in poetry that sometimes combines words and thoughts in the most succinctly profound ways. A musician picks up a guitar and begins to hum a melody and that coexists with words about who we humans are and how we think that are powerfully moving. A novelist, historian or biographer delves into the deepest human thoughts and actions that tilt the planet in conflicting directions. So it is with storytellers, those who feel a cosmic force pushing them to tell stories that explain who we are, why we are, who we hope to become. Words, music and artistry are the real ways that we are different from all the other creatures with whom we inhabit this earth. 

Writing about the first half of my life has been therapy for me. It has been a way of taking the disparate pieces of my history and putting them together in a kind of coherence that did not seem to exist when they were actually happening. Back then I only reacted. Today I am able to analyze the meaning and progression of my personal journey. I can see how the hardships and mistakes were as important in making me who I am today as the fun times and successes were. I can see that in the long stretch of history I am but a single link in my ancestry, but a necessary one as all of us of us are. There is an importance attached to every life, a purpose for our being. 

When things happen to us we are forced to react. How we choose to do so is often determined by our circumstances, our support systems or lack of them. None of us live in a vacuum. Each of us is influenced from birth by where we happen to live, how our parents have treated us, how safe or dangerous our environment is. Through nothing other than good fortune I realize that I have always been surrounded by wonderful people whose guidance and love helped me to seem strong and wonderful. 

Each of us is who we are because of millions of interactions with our environment. We never know who will impact us, who will change us for better or worse. We wake up each morning hoping that our day will be easy and pleasant, but deep inside we are on alert, knowing that the reality of life is often uncertain. The only thing we can control is how we will react, and sometimes our challenges and tragedies are so enormous that we cannot stay in command. We lose our composure and our ability to be rational, a perfectly normal thing to do. 

As I have looked at my story I have also spent much of the summer analyzing the world. It is an enormous task for sure because the truth is that there is no one best way of doing things. To believe that we should force our ideals and philosophies on others is absurd and the foundation of much of the rancor in history. It is instead through example that we are most likely to influence. People the world over respond to kindness and concern. Most individuals just want someone to take the time to hear and understand them rather than judging or condemning them. Evil is created. We are not born with it. Those of us who are lucky encounter little of it and so we learn to be good. 

I have been influenced by the generosity that has been extended to me over and over again. I have also learned how not to be by encounters with broken souls. In their own ways they demonstrated how evil is formed in our midst. I learned to avoid the traits that I witnessed in them just as truly as I was inspired by the good people who came my way. By the time I was entering my forties I had developed a sense of who I was and how I wanted my life to unfold even as I had come to realize that we can’t always get what we want. I knew that uncertainty lay ahead but I had faith in my ability to face coming challenges head on. I could not know what those would be but I knew that somehow I had already overcome many hard times. I have the skills to survive the storms.

The days from the late nineteen eighties to the present seemed to flash by far more quickly than the earlier part of my life. My whole family was busy with the work of family, friendships and jobs. We hardly had time to breathe in between our obligations but there would be the kind of interruptions that would force us to take stock of our lives once again, to change course to meet the new realities. I suppose that makes me about average in the grand scheme of things, more fortunate in where I had been born, who my parents had been, the catalog of extended family members and friends, and within my own small circle of husband and daughters. I know that I was simply lucky and for that I am thankful, but never boastful. But for circumstance my story may have been so different.