I have matured to the status of patriarch of my clan, the eldest male Kelly. Eldest male Sturgis. I am patriarch to a matriarchy, if not a simple feminarchy. Most of the women in my family are indeed mothers, but not everybody. My grandkids, all three girls, aren’t moms yet. My one and only daughter is a mother. I have childless nieces. All my aunts have kids, all younger than me. With the feeblest wisp of primogeniture, the first born Kelly grandchild of one Donald J Kelly happens to be male, me, in a world dominated from day one by women. My whole life I’ve lived in feminarchy.
It goes without saying what a pussywhipped husband I am. Wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been my supreme pleasure to serve Roxanne’s happiness. She is my true love, the love of my life. We’ve been married over fifty consecutive, uninterrupted years. She believes in fairness. She’s an honest, honorable and faithful person of reasoned judgment to whom I’ve deferred for every big decision. She’s the boss of our household. She forgives and she gives permission. I get my say but Roxanne decides what’s best. I know she loves me and respects me. Somehow I fulfill a role of Man of the House without any obvious dominance. I’ve been a good partner for her and her curiosity about the world. She has kept me just under the top in my personal approach. We may disagree, or we may agree for different reasons. Happy wife, happy life goes the old axiom. And one means to being a cool grandpa is being attached to a cool grandma.
My life in a feminarchy got going long before I met Roxanne and maybe prepared me for her. My mother was a charismatic, dominating personality. My father had no true authority or credibility in our family. Looking back a generation beyond them, my Grandma Mary, my dad’s mother, raised him as a single mother from his youth around World War II, his parents splitting up when my grandfather Sturgis went off to war. In my life I only met my grandfather Sturgis twice. His parents were long gone, but Grandma Mary and her sister Aunt Winnie both say Grandma Sturgis was the brains of that outfit as well. Mary and Winnie’s mother, Great-grandma Stoner to me, lived to be 97 and outlived their n’er do well father by several decades and there were no Stoner men to so much as carry on the name.
Grandma Mary went on to marry a younger man in John McCormick after the war and had my two uncles. They lived in Indiana and we saw them about once a year. Grandma Mary would stay with us when our mother was in the hospital, either to have a baby or a nervous breakdown but over the years grew more distant and further apart from us kids, especially after our parents divorced. Grandma Mary had her own family to dominate in Indiana. John McCormick never asserted himself as a grandfatherly patriarch to our clan but left behind two sons, my uncles, who have their own clan legacies to work out separate from us Kellys. Without Grandma Mary — or Aunt Winnie — there is no link of authority to our kinship to the Stoners and the name is extinct. The Sturgis side too is virtually extinct since our mother went to court to have us all declared Kelly. 23 and Me, the ancestry service tells me I have scores of DNA relatives on the Sturgis side, very likely descendants of the predecessors of the clan who settled in southern Minnesota, many of whom still live in the old country or migrated west to Seattle, but all these shares of genetics wherever in the world most probably are dominated by females of their respective clans.
I can only look to my own clan, as stretched out as far as I can see, and women and girls comprise the power and the glory forever, amen. Only Donald Kelly, my mother’s father, the only true grandfather I ever knew, holds any distinction of authority and credence in our family history who was male and could be considered a patriarch of his clan, until he died at 59, when I was eight. And even so, he was succeeded by his widow, my Grandma Kelly, my mom’s mother, a terrifyingly mean woman of vile temper and solicitously sadistic vocabulary who doubtlessly tormented Don Kelly the self-made rich patriarch who worked extra hours to get out of the house, and she has been more than rumored to have driven him to his heart attack and early death — she was what they used to call a shrew. She and my mother clashed like raging tornadoes until grandma banished her and us kids from her house and cabin (an estate really, at a prominent point on a popular lake) after grandpa died, and grandma ceased to have any leverage over mom’s family, us, or to express any interest in our lives and welfare for the rest of her nasty narcissistic life.
Mom had three sisters, and each in their way paid a curse to remain in a semblance of good grace to their mean wacky mother to sustain her through an eventual marriage to a closeted gay gigolo fifteen years her junior and move to his hometown in the San Francisco Bay area where she succumbed to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. My aunts, all younger than my mom, babysat me and my sisters when we were little and looked after us when they were in high school until grandma kicked us out. Losing connection to the youngest two aunts hurt because it felt like a More For Me exclusion. They kept up visitation to grandma’s cabin well after grandma herself deeded it to them before she died.
I felt abandoned by my mom’s youngest sisters. They meant my golden years to me. Grandpa Kelly was Don Kelly, alive and in charge. At Christmas. At the lake. My aunts taught me to swim and water ski. And dance. How to smoke Winstons and read comic books. Best of all they owned copies of every top ten 45 rpm record from 1954 through 1961, and a good portable record player the size of a suitcase and they trusted me to play their records and gave me unlimited access. For this alone, the unlimited access to the earliest hits of rock and roll songs, I am grateful to my aunts because it represents my romantic inclinations about life and love. From those aunts and their friends and cohorts, frolicking, water skiing, drive-in movies, cruising around the lake in boats and partying, dancing, all I wanted was to be a teenager — or as Dion DiMucci put it, a teenager in love. Didn’t happen for me, not at the cabin up at the lake. Years have gone by, decades and generations, and I have never been invited there to visit, not so much as a day trip, not even lunch. The property is still in my aunts’ family, more or less, though nobody named Kelly. My aunts’ descendants swim and water ski and teach their kids. I am of an outside clan.
The eldest child of Colleen Kelly who happens to be a male is the only pillar to make me a patriarch to my clan, but it’s an illusion. I’m the oldest of ten. Seven are sisters. I had four sisters before one brother was born, and then three more before another brother. There was never any way I could get special privileges for being a boy. I did housework chores, washed dishes, vacuumed carpets, scrubbed floors and toilets. They were chores of survival in a chaotic household where our mother the matriarch could not govern coherently and we were saved by the steady guidance of our beloved housekeeper, Eula Pratt.
Today I am a survivor in this world in some ways due to feminarchy. It certainly hasn’t hurt. My gradeschool teachers at St Simon of Cyrene were all female, as were each of the two principals. I always took the nuns more seriously than the priests. High school I remember two significant teachers, both women. At least half my college professors were women. Most of my bosses and supervisors at work were women. None of this seemed revolutionary or unusual at the time.
Eight of the top ten and fifteen of the top twenty in grade points of the high school class I supposedly graduated were girls. It was not surprising. They were all very smart. Three tied at 4.0 and had to play Rock Paper Scissors to get too give the valedictorian speech. They are probably doctors.
This is not to disavow any consciousness of male chauvinism in my lifetime, making my awareness of feminism and acceptance a conscious choice as much as my feminarchical upbringing. It seems as much a shock today as it was some time in my youth to realize women didn’t have the right to vote in the USA until about a hundred years ago. Today the rights of women worldwide don’t match up with their proportion of the population, where they cannot vote, or work, or own property, and whose bodies are held as chattel to this day. I am gifted to live in a society which, however belatedly in human history, offers equity and equality to women of all gender and persuasion. Even the right wing political parties of Europe are led by women. Even wing-nut leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene can project a voice in America. Both US Senators from my state of Minnesota are women, as is half the state’s congressional delegation, more than half the Minneapolis city council and all seven members of the city council of St Paul. Several key state legislators and federal and state judges are women, as is the newest president of the state land grant university. Four justices on the Supreme Court are women. The Vice President of the United States. This is not exceptional or extraordinary. This is what it is.
When Clara was little, around seven, at yet another tour of an art museum, she asked me why there was so much art by men and why so much women as subject matter. I didn’t have a ready answer. The historical record supported her question, both parts. Art history too supplied the answers. Most of history as we know it was written by and for men of patriarchal societies. What apparently pleased men the most was artistically rendered human figures of the female form.
To answer the first part of her question I began to compile a list of names of women artists I have encountered through their works in museums and galleries I have moseyed through the past thirteen or so years in Europe and North America. There are about two hundred names in the Word file Known Women Artists ranging from Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe to Judy Onofrio and Olga Volchkova. The list is not in alphabetical or any genre or chronological order and may include a duplicate name or two. I leave it to Clara and Tess to add to it of their own volition knowing these name make a good start if ever seeking examples to study in their spare time. I am done collecting such names, unless of course I see something stunning.
To the second part of the question I leave unanswered the pose of the human form for Clara and Tess to discover and determine on their own. They have likely sensed that I personally approve of female figures in art — clothed and unclothed — but it is not for me to direct them to appropriately appreciate these figures. I leave it to them to critique and draw their own conclusions.
I am an American white cisgender male. At age 72 I am the oldest living person of my clan, but I am not in charge, except of course of myself and my own conduct and so forth, but nothing of the sort of a chain of command of familial legacy. I have no birthright authority. I am not the dad of The Lords of Discipline or Purple Hibiscus, to offer two extremes. As an oldest brother I’ve tried to avoid Big Brother is Watching You — our mother did enough familial meddling to take an extra generation to untangle, and I don’t need to get entangled in the untanglements; her legal last will was clear, we split the assets ten equal ways and I acted as executor, I didn’t try to tell anybody how to spend the proceeds. Further, I’ve never expressed judgment in my sisters’ choices of boyfriends or husbands to influence their choices because their romantic lives are truly none of my beeswax. That goes for nieces and nephews, brothers and grandchildren.
This does not mean I don’t have my opinions and feelings for other people, I’m just not the family boss. I offer advice if asked, even if in the most subtle or passive aggressive way — one of my career talents as a banker — but I hedge a lot even so, sometimes I can be wrong. As I have matured and aged, even if my above techniques to avoid asserting pretentious authority over my siblings guided me well to mind my own beeswax when we were all younger, the lessons of a longer life have only reinforced what I learned to live and let live. My paternal guidance of my kids and grandkids is founded on my example to them in every interaction, and if my entire life — not just their lifetimes — might not be the best example of judgment and behavior, I am shy (not modest) and would rather impart the lesson than reveal the long story of how I learned it and why.
As it turns out I’ve led a very safe existence. No assassination attempts, not even those of character. A metaphor describing my life would be that I never served in the armed forces. Never enlisted. Never drafted. If I got something out of high school it was the compassion of a vice principal who agreed my antiauthoritarian attitude and military discipline would benefit nobody, not the armed forces, not me, and seriously not the nation, and wrote a letter to my draft board supporting my petition to be classified as a Conscientious Objector, and I am guessing his letter had some sway because I was granted CO classification. My lottery number never came up and I was spared ‘Nam. Spared peacetime service too. Spared military discipline. Spared veterans benefits and the GI Bill too. Spared all that and still lived through reverberations of the Vietnam war, the generation of veterans, anti-war heroes and resettled refugees who shaped some of my culture since I grew up.
I choose not to blame my mistakes on nobody mentoring me to function respectably well in this very real world, and instead admit and own to a self-guided arrogance compounded by my young ignorance that led me to make stupid choices and wasted use of my time. Fortunately I did not go to prison but I did spend a few hours behind bars under the clock at Hennepin County jail for a rash of unpaid parking tickets. I have been fired from a couple of jobs, and looking back have to admit, rightly so, I was a bad fit for the position. Gradually it seems I caught on to ways the world works and learned I wasn’t all that smart, special or clever or anywhere near as gifted as my mother asserted when I was a child.
Fortunately I was younger than middle aged when I discovered my power to squander the insight I could gain by dropping pretending I was the coolest guy on campus, the hippest fan at the concert, the smartest dude at the ranch. I resented Harvey McKay but learned nothing about outswimming sharks. Or Zen: Japanese management or motorcycle maintenance. I was 26 (Roxanne 25) when Michel was born. I wasn’t ready — most people aren’t — and still had trepidations about bringing a new human being into a world fraught with so much crazyass shit, but at the heart of the matter I wanted to be a father to have someone to love and nurture as a good person. I took it as a bonus that my first born was a daughter — a beautiful surprise — today almost every expectant parent learns a baby’s sex in utero, but believe it or not back as late as the early 1980s most parents didn’t know what sex their child was until he or she was born, and Roxanne and I didn’t really care. I saw having a daughter, looking ahead into the next generation, was riding in the shotgun seat of destiny and being privy to the future world. Title IX arrived for her just in time. Having a daughter was poetic justice. Through Michel I learned to back off and observe and let her run ahead of me to see where she would lead or come back to take my hand. Being a father taught me humility. I was 30 when Vincent was born and having a son (again we didn’t know until) added balance, harmony, conflict, abrasion and synchronicity. Fathering them reignited my curiosities and fascinations about life. I hope I have reflected well upon them what they taught me to learn.
When I first held Clara my first grandchild she was a few minutes old and I was 53 and I saw in her eyes the vision of the future I wanted to see. Tess was born almost three years later to save Clara from the fate of an only child. My only grandchildren were girls. My daughter’s kids were girls. Clara and Tess lived in Europe for four years and the benefits of visiting them are beyond esteem in my life and have paid me forward in their lives in ways I will try to forever repay. They have lived in Minneapolis over six years and I chronicle here and elsewhere my grandfatherly participation in their family upbringing. Let’s say I’ve had my chances to mess with their heads.
Neko is my son’s daughter, an only child. She will soon be six, a first grader, born when I was 66, already retired and on Medicare. For several reasons she is a special child. I love Clara my firstborn grandchild with a special bond of mutual originality. I love Tess for her eccentric willpower and loving sincerity. I love Neko as my last chance to impart my legacy of love, peace and happiness to the world. Maybe it’s because I am retired and more available to lend child care now than when Clara and Tess were little, or maybe it’s because Roxanne and I live within ten-minute proximity of Vincent and Amelie, and much of it because of pod arrangements getting through the covid-19 pandemic, I have spent more time with a kid her age than any I recall since Michel and Vincent. It’s been strange getting to book club status with the two teenager grandkids and starting over from la-la-la with the third but it’s been fun and funny starting over from the beginning. Okay, maybe I’m not as limber for playing at the park as I was with earlier kids in my care, but I try.
I began this essay musing about finding myself by default the family geezer. This is not a problem. It’s not a cause for lament. Or panic. It’s a fact. I have three namesakes of sorts — my daughter Michel is named for my middle name, and her two daughters share their mother’s name for their middle names — which hardly counts as birthright legacies from a patriarch. The Kelly name from my mother’s clan will likely pass away with Neko, Vincent’s daughter, my six year old granddaughter, who, regardless of whether a marriage changes her name would not likely pass to her children the Kelly surname, if she has any children. Regardless, after Vincent there are no more male Kellys. My brothers Sean and Kevin’s children are all daughters. My nieces and nephews no matter their sex bear their fathers’ surnames except my dead sister Molly’s daughters, whose kids include two boys both with their fathers’ surnames. Two of my sisters are legally Kelly, Leenie and Heather, but all their kids aren’t. My mother’s sisters have not been Kellys since about 1965 and thus none of their kids, my cousins, are nominally Kellys — in a way no wonder they all resented my mom so much. Even at the top of the chain, within a few years of the death of Grandpa Don, Grandma Grace got married and surrendered her Kelly for the surname Cole. I am not the last Kelly, just the oldest living Kelly male.
Forget my father’s side. The Stoner name went extinct with my great grandmother, who lived to be 97 but didn’t pass the surname. Her two daughters married and assumed new names naturally enough. Far as anyone knows, Thomas Stoner, Grandma Stoner’s inept husband was an only child. The Sturgis surname of my father more or less disappeared from the Earth in divorce court when my mother’s petition to rename all her kids Kelly was granted. My grandfather George Sturgis I met only twice I recall, though he lived in Florida well into his deep 80s. It is said Grandpa George (as we kids referred to him when we prayed our God Bless litany before bed) had some brothers but they remained obscure and invisible. There was a Charles Sturgis who my dad referred to as Cousin Chuckie, who established a communications firm of such success he became known as rich and an influential philanthropist, who died recently survived by a brother and a daughter and son named Kevin I’ve never encountered in person or in the press. One time Roxanne and I took a road trip down south of Rochester to Stewartville, roots of the Sturgis and Stoners. Both family farms have passed from the families. At the cemetery we located several gravestones of Sturgises. My dad has two brothers by his mother, who remarried after Grandpa George, but those uncles go by McCormick, live in Indiana and have little to do with us surviving Kellys, they have their own clan to care for.
Without a namesake or coat of arms to rally them in the future I rely on the court of my lady offspring to carry on. They will be more effective than I am. Beyond laissez faire, I’m just plain lazy. I’m not good at organizing picnics. I let things organically fall into place, what will be will be, knowing if human planning and intervention is warranted, the females in my family will make it so. As Shakespeare’s Juliet says, “What’s in a name?”
Little is said about Thomas Kelly, my great grandfather. Grandpa Don Kelly was the youngest of 13, ten of whom were girls. Thomas died when Don was 3. The family had recently moved to East Saint Paul from a small central Minnesota town called Bird Island. Their existence in Bird Island is murky. No property records show any land in their name. Small town talk recalls a Thomas Kelly of dubious reputation likened to a horse thief who was run out of town around the turn of the 20th century. An Irishman who appeared out of the mist who said he was from Ohio married one Kathleen Kelley of Bird Island, Minnesota, apparently worked the local farms, fathered 13 kids and for some reason — if nothing else perhaps the allure of a job with the railroad in the Big Cities — moved his brood to a big old house in a working class settlement on the eastern fringe of St Paul, where he summarily died, we are told, of natural causes.
The true hero of the family saga is the surviving widow Kathleen, for whom my sister Leenie is named, who raised her 13 kids as a matriarchal mastermind. She put the elder kids to work until the younger ones caught up and until the youngest one actually graduated college and attended law school. It was like the family ponzi scheme for the Kelly siblings to support young Don, and by accounts of a couple of sisters who survived him, my mother’s aunts Kitty and Madge, Don used proceeds from his early success as an attorney to provide for their aging mother and generously recompensated those sisters and brothers who helped him get his education. The mother Kathleen passed away in her eighties, when Don was around thirty — yes, Don was a late child, my mom would tell us, and there was the risk that a child born to a woman of 50 was at risk of being retarded, implying the opposite, the child could be a genius. My mom never knew her grandmother, who passed away before Don met Grace, but spoke about her as an icon of motherhood and discipline. I never heard a first person account of what kind of charisma Kathleen Kelly possessed to manage to almost create a dynasty around a patriarch in the person of Donald J Kelly.
That would have been ironic. As it turns out nobody of either sex inherited his mantle, his law firm or commercial real estate portfolio or seats on boards of tech companies. Yes, his widow and daughters inherited a substantial estate, all held in trust until grandma’s death. By then the bank that administered the trust, faithful to grandpa’s impeccable will, preserved the principal assets but left the heirs, my mom and her sisters, no enterprise or company to carry on. This of course liberated each sister to capitalize her assets and establish a brand of her own, which none of them ever did. No matter.
I of little ambition in the first place recognize my place in the great scheme of things, and at my advanced age find myself content in the material world. Don’t infer this confession to mean I’m satisfied with how this world adds up today. I expect better from humanity, but with some familiarity with history I can see a lot of evidence we are getting to be what we can be. Much of my contentment derives from my fortunate material well being, a comfortable middle class American retiree. The rest of my outlook from this comfortable perspective sees progress and opportunities for good, even in view of atrocities, sadness and tragedies. One trend of light that generates my hope is the normality of the influence of women in the course of human events.
The most powerful marketing force the world has ever known is named after an ancient tribe of women warriors. From Princess Diana to Isabel Allende my generation has been shaped by women of our time. We name-drop Harriet Tubman to cite our historical credentials but whether woke or unwoke, DEI or not, liberal civilization depends on the participation of its women to survive in generations beyond the Baby Boom. You don’t need to empower women. They got it already. To try to take it away at this point, to silence the voice of Margaret Atwood, for example, invites what it takes shy of real world Lysistrata conspiracy in retaliation.
Blame Women’s Lib, I don’t care. Today’s world feminacracy will be tomorrow’s best path towards peace and prosperity across the planet. This is a way bigger effin’ deal than drivers licenses in Arabia. If democracies prevail it will take the leadership of women like Ida B Wells and on in America to shunt aside strong man dictators and patriarchal diktats such as ISIS and Taliban. In western democracy women can try and fail just like men, and try again and perhaps prevail at the ballot. Europe and the UK illustrate thus, left and right.
The United States staggers on to elect its first woman President, having muffed the chance in 2016. Kamala Harris exemplifies all I’ve been saying this whole essay.
Retreat to chauvinism at great peril. That’s my advice to wannabe patriarchs today. Like the Ice Queen sings it in the movie, Let It Go. Any superstitious pretense of machismo power will be challenged. You will have daughters. And nieces. Sisters and wives. They will probably be better educated.
So as I get older and older by years, day by day I come to clearly realize I don’t care about my forebears very much any more. I’m interested in my descendants. Almost all of them are female — son Vincent the sole genetical holdout, and his sole child is a girl. If seeing them run loose in this world isn’t vicarious heaven on this earth then I would have no faith to guide my love. I look at both my kids, and their kids, and at Roxanne, and I want to say I couldn’t have planned it better. This is a moment to savor like a summer evening in July around sundown.
Our family is permanent, said Tess. We tend to prove it true.
I usually rise in the morning before sunrise. I can’t help it. I’m done sleeping and my mind awakens to the day. StarTribune and coffee. July morning on the front porch.
From this lucky vantage I can gather a humble wisdom. I can look back and reflect all I want and it all adds up to this, and I’m happy. I’m happy it’s not over. I project new memories, future things. My life will be much like it is, but new things will happen. I’ll see something new. The more you see the more you know the more you see, my son in law Sid recited to me a lifetime ago, which he got from a professor at UM Duluth. For me it keeps adding up.
I’m 72 now and there’s no hip cryptic fancy slogan to go with it like my last one, my Summer of 69. Nothing like 63, That’s Easy to Remember; or Hey, I’m 64; and Gettin’ Kicks on Route 66. The pandemic lost years of ZOZO had no slogans either, which was why my Summer of 69 was supposed to be my butterfly coming out party. Which it was, but for all the unintended lessons from events in and out of my control, a year of death and mourning, reckoning, repentance and self-aware conciliation. It’s funny to get over the pandemic distancing and not feel awkward and vulnerable in crowds. I’m tempted to invoke, Screw You I’m 72, but that would be wrong.
Much as I make a gift of being this old, I can celebrate without claiming entitlement. The universe is indifferent. Getting used to that idea goes a long way to contentment. No use getting cranky and giving the world the finger. I owe a lot of respect to you thousands of readers around the planet who attend my lyceum of the soul and somehow empathize with this middle American baby boomer. It shows me we share common perceptions and aspirations wherever we live on Earth, even if we don’t share exactly the same origins or conclusions. I warned you all from the beginning I wasn’t taking any hemlock.
Angela Davis was a philosophy professor at the University of California Los Angeles from the 1960s. She articulated the entangled issues of civil rights and social justice and got under the skin of then California governor Ronald Reagan. She was an espoused Marxist, and though I reject the abolition of capitalism, I admired Angela Davis for her critical exposure of the truths of underlying corruption within socioeconomic systems that suppress human rights. I named my daughter’s middle name Angela after her, though I tell some people it was after Angela Cartwright, an actress and other cultural icon of the boomer generation, but emphasize it was definitely not after Angela Lansbury.
Angela Davis explored a different passage towards serenity when she said, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
Amen, as they say in church.
BMK
Buffalo Kelly 