From which I learned to be a wife...

I've spoken before of how I learned more important lessons about living and life from reading Robert Heinlein's work than I learned from watching my own family's interactions.  There's good reason for that: as most have gathered, my family is dysfunctional, at best.  I have one aunt that has been married for more than ten years, and her marriage isn't a good one, but one where she and her husband are sort of symbiotic parasites.

So, I turned elsewhere.  I read.  And read.  And read.  And finally found my example of how to be a functional human being in Robert Heinlein's work.  Then, I found my role model of how to be a good wife from his character of Maureen in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. 

I do love that book.  No one else but the Grand Master of Science Fiction could, in 1987, set part of his science fiction novel in the late nineteenth century.  The main character, Maureen, taught me much: she, like me, is amoral, and a bit of a sociopath, who had to make up her own set of social rules to live by.  Some of mine are based on hers.  Like me, she had a mother who was a bit of a self-righteous fundamentalist. 

Unlike me, she had a spectacular father.  Her father was her guide in creating her code of morals, and was her helper while her husband was off in WWI. 

I learned so much from her.  The single useful lesson my mother taught me (how to budget, and how important it was) was reinforced, but other lessons included how to raise children, how to live with a husband and equal, and how to live with yourself, when you were alone. 

The plot of the novel is a bit loose, containing much of the character's back story to fluff out her now, which is very...very...thin.  The story is told mostly while she's sitting in a holding cell in an alternate reality not her own, and is told as if she's talking directly to the reader.  It's a remarkably engaging read, for such a character-centric, plot-shy story, but that's to be expected from such a master storyteller, so close to the end of his career. 

The character herself has some...interesting quirks.  She is the mother of the oldest human known in her existence, Lazarus Long (who tells his own amazing life story in Time Enough for Love), and winds up sleeping with him. 

Yeah, that part kind of squicked me out, too.

Beyond that, Maureen's life is one well-lived, and is a story well-told, and well worth reading. 

Cheers.