Be Too Much
On pillars, storms, and the women who refuse to be quiet
In the last few months, my world was detonated with the small-town equivalent of an atomic bomb.
Not an actual explosion, but close enough. There was a press release. And then, another one. And another one. Mugshots. Court filings. Words like possession, production, sexual abuse of a minor. The names were not strange to me. Men I knew. Men whose advice I sought. Men who sat on school boards and councils and various important boards. Men who spoke calmly, rationally. The kind of men women are trained to trust implicitly. We might even choose them over the bear.
In North Dakota there are certain surnames that are “good” surnames. Marrying into one of the “good” families was a gift to be envied. These men were good men. They had wives: teachers, architects, published authors. These women earned real standing in their own right. These men weren’t caricatures of power; they were pillars of the community. These men appeared credible and trustworthy in a meaningful way. They appeared to earn that trust, along with their accomplished (and unknowing) wives.
What struck me hardest was not just the sheer horror of the crimes, but the familiarity of the men. They are my age. They lived the precise life for which I was expected to yearn as a woman of marriageable age. There was a time when I (and I don’t mean this metaphorically) was supposed to marry one of them.
In fact, I almost did.
The storm
In my twenties, I was engaged to a wealthy farmer. My dad was over the moon. I grew up in rural North Dakota, raised mostly by a single father on a civil servant’s salary living in a remote government-provided house. Like most fathers of the Silent Generation, my dad wanted security for his daughters. Marrying into a wealthy farm (OMG, 6000 acres!) family was security, embodied: land, money, stability, a clean and repeatable blueprint for a good life.
The flowers were ordered (lavender, for the curious). Venue paid. Dress fitted. Rings purchased. Bridal shower. All the pretty things perfectly planned.
Then, several weeks before the wedding, he didn’t come home over Fourth of July weekend. Three days with no call and no explanation. Although this occurred “back in the day” when there were no cell phones, three days with no calls was still pretty shocking.
During those three days, a massive storm hit the area. A prairie storm of epic proportion that still holds some records. Believe me when I say it was Biblical. One of the firmest memories I have of the storm was looking outside the window down the street and seeing a 20-foot-tall geyser of water shooting out of a manhole. I had just bought my first home with my first grown-up job, and I cowered in my freshly poured basement, listening to the straight-line winds, wondering why the man I was about to marry was nowhere to be found.
When he finally came back on a sunny, Sunday in the late afternoon after the storm, he arrived at my house.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry. I handed him the (landline) phone and asked him to call his parents because I had called the wedding off.
His first words weren’t remorse or concern. No, no. They were, “What did you say to them?”
He was worried I may have embarrassed him.
I said, “Nothing. I cancelled the wedding. That’s all.”
I asked him to pack his things and move out. I went to stay with my dad for a week while he did.
The Clean Up
He was, ironically, a gentleman about the logistics. He didn’t damage the house. He didn’t smash my FiestaWare. He moved out quietly.
Later, I learned he trashed me to friends. To neighbors. I was psycho. Crazy. All the familiar names men reach for when a woman draws a line and refuses to cross back over it. I often joke women who leave their spouses in North Dakota can only be one of two things: (1) a whore; or (2) crazy. He chose crazy. meh, whatever. Maybe I am a little crazy.
The physical mess was minimal. The social one was not.
I arrived at my dad’s rural front yard after the five (5) hour drive home in my stick shift Geo Prism. My music for the break-up drive was Billy Joel, Simon and Garfunkel, and Alanis Morrisette. On homemade cassettes, obviously. It’s not like I had compact disc money back then. My Dad was surprised, but happy to see me. I needed a soft place to land. I expected him to take my side in this nonsense.
He didn’t.
My dad was upset at me. Why had I thrown away a good marriage over one weekend of bad judgment? He was a good man! Why couldn’t I overlook it? Why couldn’t I be more practical? It’s not like he hit me. It’s not like he cheated. Certain behavior from men needed to be . . . overlooked. I needed to be forgiving. Go back. Uncancel the wedding.
Growing up a girl in rural North Dakota in the 70s and 80s was hard. I was brown-haired and freckled with big, frizzy Irish hair in a sea of silky blonde, tall and thin Norwegians. I was loud. Too smart. Too opinionated. Probably a little obnoxious. I didn’t cheerlead or dance or take the basketball stats. I was on the debate team. I verbally scrapped people for fun.
My dad said it out loud: maybe . . . maybe . . . I wasn’t farm-wife material. Not efficient enough. I wasn’t accepting enough. I was a little “too much.”
He meant well. He wanted safety and economic security for his daughters. He wanted the round hole for his square-peg daughter because round holes looked secure.
I carried that for years. The sense that I had failed at something I was supposed to want. It followed me. My too-much-ness.
The Bomb
Then, decades later, the shocking arrests started.
They were men that followed the predictable, repeatable blueprint for Midwest success. These weren’t just men that I knew of. I knew them. They were my age, my social group, my world. Men with reputations for steadiness and wisdom. Men whose respectability was purportedly earned through wise farm choices or steady reason and logic. I would have happily had any of them sit on any of my juries - in fact, one did sit on a jury I chose. He was the foreman.
And then yesterday, the atomic blast erupted over my head laying waste to decades of socially generated and parent-reinforced inner doubt.
I woke up to the news: the man I called off the wedding with six weeks to spare—the man whose three-day bender was treated as forgivable by my own father—arrested on child sexual abuse allegations.
Suddenly, my brain clicked like a booby trap in Indian Jones. And the gears began to move.
That weekend wasn’t a fluke. It was a tell. The problem was never that I too much. I was just right.
There was something in me then that continues even now. In all of us women. We women who are loud, opinionated, and inconvenient for polite society. We women who wouldn’t make the cut to be efficient, prudent farm wives. We see the cracks in the pillar before it collapses. Something in us knows absence in a storm matters. Something in us refuses to trade intuition for social approval.
Be too much
Recently, I caught myself saying something my own artsy daughter after she left a trail of creative chaos behind her in our large, but crowded house: You know, someday you’ll want to go to college, and no one will want to live with you if you can’t be a little tidier.
Wait, what??
Here is my new message to her, and to every girl who has been told she is too loud, too opinionated, too messy, too much:
Be too much.
Be loud. Be inconvenient. Be opinionated. Be so fully yourself that you cannot be wedged into a life built to hide someone else’s stinking, fetid rot.
Wear the clothes, dye your hair blue, laugh too hard. Refuse to weather the storm by yourself. Embrace your friends who will sit in the dank basement with you.
My problem was never that I was too much.
My “too much” saved me from a life of hollowness.
Girls, your too much is your compass.
Trust it. Be Too Much.
"Be too much"... is the farthest thing from what my mom told me when I was growing up. I wish that's what she said though. I appreciate this Erin!
Having stringent convictions is never “too” anything.