About respecting your own needs

[cjsmith]

“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/16/the-crane-wife/

Comments

[lcohen]

there is a post being shared on FB pulled from AITA on reddit about a woman whose husband doesn't like her to read because then she is not available to converse with (read: pay attention to) him whenever he desires so she's read, i forget, maybe 3 books in 5 years. i didn't sing with a choral group for the 14 years of my first marriage because my wife didn't take my singing seriously. this story is everywhere, without the feathers.

[cjsmith]

EXACTLY. That’s the point that the writer of the linked article is making, I suspect it’s why the story shows up in folklore, and it’s why I wanted to link it here. It’s mind-bogglingly, enragingly pervasive.