A What?

Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

Every morning, as I get my first cup of coffee, I take a look at the daily prompt so my mind can ponder it while I prepare to do the actual writing. Often my mind responds like a Fourth of July sparkler, with many useful ideas generated from that single core.

And today? No sparklers. My mind responded with a wrath-of-Zeus thunderbolt. And the storm continues to swirl darkly about. An obvious question echoes in the wind:

“Why does it have to be a man?”

Why doesn’t the prompt say “person”? Is there going to be a follow-up prompt tomorrow asking for a description of a woman who has positively impacted my life? Why do I doubt this? And why does such sexism still linger?

Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is coming in the face of seeing women still changing their names when they get married. Maybe it’s the result of state Supreme Court decisions that protect a stillborn fetus over the life of a mother. Maybe it’s seeing legislators woking an agenda that seems to take great strides toward making the United States of America into the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale. But enough is enough.

If the prompt asked for “person,” I would simply have told of the nun in high school who turned me on to the arts. You can find the story in my memoir, Immaculate Misconceptions: Tales of Catholic School, so I don’t feel the need to recount it here. But I never had a man affect my life as profoundly as she did, and I wouldn’t be writing this blog if she hadn’t.

So let’s examine our prompts, shall we?