What Stand By Your Man means Today
Caroline, author of post, in the lap of her mother Laura, 1980.
While I’m usually at a soccer game or a birthday party late on a Saturday morning, today I am home with my dog who was spayed this past Wednesday. She is having some post-surgical complications, so someone needs to be with her for monitoring. Since Wednesday morning, based on the explicit messaging and threats from the next administration, I cannot help but think, “In 2025, my dog and cat could have more fundamental rights accessible than many of us human beings.”
Not surprising to say I have some extra energy this morning, I turned on some music for background company and became delighted as I heard Natalie Maines’ rendition of Stand By Your Man. What sounds to be a juxtaposition, Natalie Maines of The Chicks and the words Stand By Your Man, actually embodies my mother who passed in April to become a twinkling star, a warm hand on my shoulder, a feeling in my core that she’s got my back.
Mom used to sing Stand By Your Man, Dolly and Tammy’s version, and then she would laugh. So many know her laugh. I wonder how many knew her laugh contained multitudes of meaning.
My mother was a Democrat in a sea of red in the various small South Carolina towns we lived in. Her vow to be a strong woman because “women are like horses, we can do anything,” followed in the footsteps of my great-grandmother Grace, who gingerly plowed into my great-grandfather Poppaw’s car in front of the church in Jonesborough, Tennessee, when she found out he was sleeping with someone else. Poppaw and Grandmother did end up repairing their relationship as far as I know, after they ran against each other for the town mayor’s seat. But the cracks of rupture, the relational wounds that birthed the shame and secrecy in the first place still seep down generation after generation. Deep gashes take a long time to heal.
But, as they say, the cracks are where the light get in. When my mother sang “Stand By Your Man,” she was no fool. She liked to look pretty, she was trying to right the wrongs by channeling her energy into beauty, using her creativity to try to brighten her world, but she would not look away from things. She bit back.
Some people make jokes about her bites, her potential wrath, and how she got them from so-and-so, and how so-and-so does it too, how it’s a “family gene, ha ha, bless their heart.” I understand her bites as deep and necessary attempts to take up space where she was initially not allowed. The problem and the gift is that the body remembers and stores the inhibited movement expression that aches to be met, recognized, celebrated and channeled into satisfying and sustainable paths of expression and living.
Early on, when our elders can catch and celebrate our bites, recognize them as the spaciousness and primal energy we need for moving into ourselves. We don’t need to, using Resmaa Menakem’s words, blow pain through other bodies, onto our peers, our children, our lovers, our neighbors, our fellow citizens.
My mother saw man after man in her life store secrets. Heartbreaking, shameful secrets passed down to their male bodies, nevertheless, damning to others. Quick fixes, like infidelity and addictions, don’t produce long term gains but long term pain. When generations of children are not invited to be who they are, their life energy, their prana, their chi is stored deep in the crevices of their core, their pelvis, hidden unfairly from their own sense of self. Reaching for relief, normalized by the culture of misogyny, tells men it’s okay to grab a woman by the pussy to fix what feels wrong about themselves.
When an elder cannot celebrate a child, the child’s uniqueness, their differences, their similarities, their preferences, the child cannot develop a capacity to hold their own robust sense of self. Where does that stored energy go? Where do the parts of ourselves we cannot tend to with courage and tenderness go?
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ~ Carl Jung
That stored energy is projected onto others. Differences of sex, gender, race, beliefs, interests, ways of moving, get projected, pathologized and dehumanized into weaponry of the politics we are seeing today.
I do not think my mother is floating around feeling sorry or guilty or hopeless right now. I think she’s here in the music, in the flowers, in the fall leaves, in the buzz of energy many of us are feeling, telling us – however we identify – to turn on the music and question the lyrics:
Perhaps Stand By Your Man wasn’t implying “mother your lover” but “mother your children.” Invite them into your lap. Have their back. With unconditional love, let them know all their identities and parts and expressions, their pushes and pulls, are meant to be recognized by their parents, their elders, in an effort for their authentic selves to feel empowered, necessary and free.