The Manus menace that's a ticking time bomb

The Manus menace that's a ticking time bomb: #PNG #MANUS #AsylumSeekers: on paper, the concept of...

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#USA #RELIGION CRAZY PEOPLE: James Manning - always good for a...

#USA #RELIGION CRAZY PEOPLE: James Manning - always good for a bit of bare-cheeked effrontery.

http://bit.ly/1eP0GML

QUOTE:

This is devastating what Obama is doing to the black man and the black woman, and how the white homo is now moving into the black neighborhoods looking for black men that have been converted into homosexuality. But black woman let me say something to you: you have a very hard time competing against a white homosexual male. He’s usually got money — a white homo usually has an American Express card. He usually has an opportunity at the theater — homos love the theater. They love to go out to dinners, parties, they love that kind of a thing… black people need to rise up in mass and recognize the utter destruction that Obama is going in to destroy the black family with these homosexual statements that he has done and release of demons.

/QUOTE http://on.fb.me/1hwvuqz

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Maine GOP Rep [Lawrence Lockman] Apologizes for Saying Men...

Maine GOP Rep [Lawrence Lockman] Apologizes for Saying Men Should Get to Rape Women… Because Abortion

There’s no statute of limitations on the crime of being a jackass.

QUOTE:

“If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman?” Lockman said. “At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”

/QUOTE

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The One Thing Christians Should Stop Saying

The One Thing Christians Should Stop Saying: #RELIGION v. #FAITH: how Christians over-use the word...

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#AUSTRALIA #PNG #AsylumSeekers: former (conservative) PM Malcolm...

#AUSTRALIA #PNG #AsylumSeekers: former (conservative) PM Malcolm Fraser comments on the Manus Island situation.

"If the minister will not inform the public, then we are within our rights to assume the worst." http://on.fb.me/1fziWOC

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O-Shen

O-Shen: #AUSTRALIA #freewestpapua: O-Shen weighs in on Australia’s role in West Papua.

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Paitim Garamut

Paitim Garamut: #PNG #CABINET RESHUFFLE: is it enough? Will it matter? Or is it just buying time?

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Abu Ghraib - 9 years on

USA ABU GHRAIB IN HINDSIGHT: fascinating to read this article - written 9 May 2004 - featuring an interview with an Al Jazeera employee interrogated by US forces in Iraq.

QUOTE:
As I write, Rumsfeld is before Congress trying to explain how U.S. forces could do such things. Many of the journalists in Baghdad think that this will surely finish him off, that it’s only a matter of time. I watched Bush give his apology last night, but it all seems too late. The revelations of torture in Iraq by U.S. soldiers have pushed the country through a bloody and bruised event horizon. There is no apology that can bring us back.
/QUOTE

Yeah - amazing what time and disinterest will do to justice. No cakes and sparklers for this anniversary.

Again, I strongly recommend reading Rachel Maddow's book Drift and watching the MSNBC presentation of Hubris.

DOMA

US #DOMA MARRIAGE EQUALITY ARGUMENTS: it's hard to maintain a stance that holds the US Constitution to be some sort of divinely-inspired & infallible document (except that one bit they forgot to put in but added later but that's OK because obviously, guns), while ignoring the bit about state-sponsored religion...

But since cognitive dissonance is NOT making their heads explode, here's a little snippet from the DOMA hearings that should make it extremely clear:

Elena Kagan read from the House Report from Congress when it passed the law in 1996, which summarized DOMA's entire legal underpinning: "Congress decided to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality."

Collective moral judgement; enshrined discrimination.

At various times in history, it was the collective moral judgement that interracial couples should not marry; that women should not vote; that humans could be owned; that indigenous peoples should be eradicated; that old women with cats should be accused of witchcraft. Some people still hold those judgements, but we don't give them airspace any more.

Moral judgements change. DOMA, too, will find itself consigned to history.

Coincidences

I've just listened to the Coincidence episode from This American Life and I SO wish I'd had the opportunity to contribute! I have a metric ton of them - growing up as a global nomad, running into people at unexpected places in random countries, etc... But this one's a doozy.
It's too late for TAL, but I decided it deserved an airing anyway.
*************
I graduated from a high school in Papua New Guinea in 1988, with 26 people (of 8 different nationalities) in our graduating class. Over the next 7 years, my best friend in the USA keeps track of everyone as best she can (pre-Facebook); then she gets married & sends all the notes and Contact slips to me in Australia.
So in 1998 I'm organising our 10-year reunion, to be held in Dallas, TX. One person in particular I've lost completely, and his surname is a common one; but I have a contact slip from 3 years prior, saying that he's in Philadelphia and marrying this girl with a very distinctive Polish surname. I call Information and there are two listings in Philadelphia - Charles Jr & Charles Sr. I call Jr, get an answering machine, leave a message saying "I'm looking for Paul L, he married this woman and was she by any chance related to you? If so, please ask him to ring me." Then I call Sr, talk to the guy, he has no idea who Paul is. Dead end - I write off the other number as well.
A week later, my phone rings - it's Paul! So I'm excited to talk to him but also a bit confused about the chain of events - I ask him, so how did you get the message?
* He says, what do you mean - didn't you leave me a message?
* I said, well, yes; but how did it get to you?
* He says, I got home and played it...?
Confusion reigns.
Took a bit longer to get to the bottom of it, but - turns out: he'd split up with his wife (she of the distinctive surname) 6 months earlier, and rented a random apartment where the phone was already connected. That phone? was the one listed under Jr's name. He literally came home & pressed Play.
o_O
I've had the chills over that, for 15 years!

[Suzanne's Travels] Homeward Bound

It's 8am on Sunday morning. My flight back to Brisbane is Tuesday lunchtime.

I'm finding it difficult to sum up the "feel" of this visit: on the one hand, I have been reminded again of
* the incredible advantages of the wantok/tambu systems,
* the generosity of spirit overall and
* the joys of communal living;
on the other hand, I have been reminded again of
* the incredible bonds & disadvantages of the wantok/tambu systems,
* the frustration of dealing with "PNG time",
* the unbelievably annoying aspects of communal living and
* despair over whether or not it is remotely possible to do something which will genuinely (eventually) bring change to the underlying & perpetual potential for violence & corruption.

As I write this, it's 8am & I'm sitting on the front porch of my niece's house. My 9yo cousin E1 is up; one of my tambus (T1) has left for work (security guard) & one (T2) just arrived home, the worse for wear after falling asleep (drunk) at a bus stop & being mugged; my nephew D & 1 other wantok (Y) are asleep on the porch; my 2 aunties T3 & C who look after the house, & the wantok (L) who is the Official Babysitter to The Destroyer (my niece's 21-month-old daughter E2), are still asleep inside, as are my niece G & her husband R and (thankfully!) E2 herself. That's 10 people in a 4-bedroom house, and the numbers fluctuate throughout the day/week.

Last night there was a massive kerfuffle round the side of the house & I went out on the back porch to see what was going on. (First, I have to explain that the downstairs of the house is split into two flats: one 1-bedroom currently occupied by an American MK (M) on a Fulbright scholarship, the other a 4-bedroom rented by 5 sisters from Kimbe.) So, a man - who one of the sisters was acquainted with at Uni this year - had come to the house on Friday, when said sister (J) had expressed concern that he even knew where she lived and had told him to leave. He came back, drunk, last night. F, the only other sister at home had opened, & then immediately shut, their door - he shoved the door open, an altercation ensued & then he punched J in the head & split open a 1" long gash at her temple. So the kerfuffle was 9 of our lain (pronounced "line", means - at its most basic level - "family") all turning out to confront this guy. He was so drunk that he didn't even react when he was poked (or, as I call it, "stabbed") twice with a sharp machete/bush knife by T1, & eventually had to be physically carried to, & thrown out, the gate because he would/could not leave on his own. J said not to call the police because of how difficult it can be to get them to do anything without bribing them. M provided butterfly bandages to hold J's cut closed; I applied 2 of them after 15 minutes of J holding ice against the wound, then a carful of people (R, G, C, D, F, J) left to take J to the hospital for stitches, and I went to bed.

Variations of this scene happen over and over and over again in PNG, every night, and it's why I'm involved with the Domestic Violence group here. J is lucky enough to live in a private home with a group of people & access to a car to go to the hospital - many/most women don't have that option. The police corruption is another subject entirely.

S.

**********
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.". -- Edward Everett Hale

[Suzanne's Travels] "...a fire within you..."

"Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit light a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it.."

Wilfred Peterson

**********

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.". -- Edward Everett Hale

[Suzanne's Travels] Ringworm! Yay!

This is the father of (some of) the 9 puppies. He and the meri dog both have round patches of missing hair, but it's taken these 2 active lesions for me to convince mine hosts that letting their 21-month old anywhere near the puppies is probably a bad idea.

[Suzanne's Travels] Where am I?

I was asked, "where are you?", and so was reminded that I'd never quite explained that!

I'm in PNG right now - been here 6 weeks, going back to Brisbane on 20 November. I'm looking for work up here so that I can be actively present & involved in the PNGns Against Domestic Violence (FB group) legal and practical work to break the DV cycle in PNG.

Donations to the group gratefully accepted via PayPal at this email address, or via direct deposit (accounts in PNG and Australia)!

[Suzanne's Travels] (non-comprehensive) smell snapshots of PNG

* acrid tang of mosquito coils
* delightfully fatty hot artery-clogging lamb flaps
* nastiness of kumul (boiled celery/pumpkin greens, fennel etc)
* clean, fresh rice
* filthy, never-bathed dogs
* rain on dust
* overarching fecundity
* lingering death (the cat doesn't like the mice's heads)
* choking wood smoke
* rancid pig fat
* bland boiled chicken
* tang of fresh ginger

[Suzanne's Travels] That persistent whine...

Nothing reminds you more that you're in the tropics, than being in the loo (toilet, bog, dunny, "bathroom") at 2am with one rogue mosquito that you just can't seem to locate. No malingering!

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So this happened. A GOP delegate from Pennsylvania, Mark Harris, visited DisneyWorld in Orlando with his wife before carrying on to attend the Republican National Committee shindig in Tampa, and blogged about this outrage:

During our time at Epcot we visited the different countries. It was neat seeing each country and the employees were from that individual country. Then we visited America . . . one would think you would find American employees. We were offended to find a person from Mexico working in America.

What does this even mean? Do you mean "Hispanic" or "Latino" (or other PC term for "a person claiming to be American despite clearly not being white enough to qualify")? Or an actual citizen of the country of Mexico, working at the 'Murkah stand?

If the former, I assume you read "Jorge Estanza" or something on his name tag; if the latter, how do you know he was Mexican? Since you're not the police and this didn't happen in Arizona, you can't have asked him for proof of citizenship...?

I'm going to have to go with the "you're racist assholes" explanation.

Mark spoke up and told them he was highly offended after visiting the other countries and seeing employees from that country and then come to America and find a Mexican. He was very civil but his point was well made.

The post drew some unwanted attention to the couple... two days later, they posted this:

As noted, only in the country of the United States, within Epcot, was a staff member representing and working, who did not have a name tag representing that country. I would say being offended may been too harsh, disappointed or dismayed may have been a better choice of words.

So... wait, I'm confused. First off, the name tag thing again: the employee's name tag stated that s/he was not from America? Or it just contained a name you found too ethnic? Either way: still racist assholes.

Also - in two days you went from "highly offended" to "disappointed or dismayed"? That's a hell of a turnaround - and, frankly, not a terribly credible one.

Man up, random politician from Backwoods, PA! If finding "a Mexican" working at the America stall at DisneyWorld genuinely "highly offends you", then don't try to walk it back - stand by your convictions! - lest you appear to be spineless racist assholes.

RIP, Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11 Moon Landing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLu0Ak9Blog&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Explicit Violence", by Lidia Yuknavitch

This is such a fantastic essay that I'm going to reproduce it here in its entirety. It's long, but stunningly worth reading.

EXPLICIT VIOLENCE
BY LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
August 22nd, 2012

In a bar, with friends, listening to a man I’ve admired for years saying this: “Enough with the sob stories, ladies. We get it. If I hear one more story about some fucked up sad violent shit that happened to you, I’m going to walk. You win! You win the sad shit happened to me award! On behalf of my gender, I decree: We suck!” Laughter. The clinking of glasses. Again the secret crack in my heart. Stop telling.

The first time I saw my father’s specific sadistic brutality manifest in physical terms, I was four. My sister was flopped across his lap, barebottom. He hit her thirteen times with his leather belt. I counted. That’s all I was old enough to do. It took a very long time. She was twelve and had the beginning of boobs. I was in the bedroom down the hall, peeking out from a faithlessly thin line through my barely open bedroom door. The first two great thwacks left red welts across her ass. I couldn’t keep watching, but I couldn’t move or breathe, either. I closed my eyes. I drew on the wall by my door with an oversized purple crayon — large aimless circles and scribbles. Not the sound of the belt—but her soundlessness is what shattered me. Still.

The second time I saw my father’s naked brutality he came at my mother – I mean the second time I physically witnessed my father looking more animal than man, his embodied rage – he threw a coffee mug at her head. Hard. He once tried out for the Cleveland Indians as a pitcher. That hard. He missed, and the mug punched a hole through the wall in the kitchen. My sister was long gone—the escape of college. Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still. I’d recently written a fifth grade school report on hurricanes.  It felt like we were in the eye.

My father never struck my mother. She told me it was because she was a cripple. My mother was born with one of her legs six inches shorter than the other. She said, “He wouldn’t dare hit me,” the lilt of a southern drawl and vodka in her never-went-to-college voice, some kind of messed up trust in her too blue eyes. Instead, he molested his daughters.

Our legs were perfect.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

When I was sixteen a boy older than me asked me out on a date. I was as sixteen as a girl could be. Barely able to breathe with the incomprehensibility of my own body. The heat and pulse and lurch.  When he drove me home, and parked outside my house, we kissed. Because I was stupid and sixteen I thought we were alone. I got out of the car, and leaned back in through his open driver’s side window to kiss him some more, my mouth, his mouth, wet heat and tongue of youth sliding into youth, and my father, who was standing behind me there in the dark, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me all the way back to the house. My ear became more than red and hot. Then ringing. Then pain. I thought he would pull my ear off. Briefly, I saw the boy step out of his car—did he mean to save me? I shook my head wordlessly, no. Or maybe it was just in my eyes through the dark. No. He got back in his car.

That night my father hit me with language. Slut. Over and over again.

Purple Crayon.

Belt.

The second time I was molested I was twelve. I was on an out-of-state swimming trip with my swim team. Nebraska. Even now, I understand, the hormonal chaos of all of us half-naked in the pool every day of our lives, six to eight a.m., four to six p.m. pushing our corporeal truths up and out—I understand how hard it was for our bodies to find forms for things. A seventeen year old boy named Robert asked me to come sit by him on the plane and share his Walkman earphones—to hear a song he liked. He had one in his ear and he put the other in my ear. The song was “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. As I leaned in closely, he reached up underneath my tank top and fondled my barely there tits. I kept stealing glances at the airplane barf bag. But I didn’t move. I remember being terrified to move. Not the terror of violence. I didn’t think he’d hurt me. It was the terror of my own body. My nipples responding to this thing that made me want to throw up.  Or just die there in the seat of the airplane. Crashing, crashing. Wishing for it. “When you wake up it’s a new morning/ The sun is shining, it’s a new morning/ You’re going, you’re going home.”

To this day if I hear “Baker Street,” which is mercifully almost never, I can vomit.

To this day, I would rather have taken ten plane trips sitting next to Robert than live with my father growing up.

Baseball.

Coffee mug.

Walkman.

Barf bag.

The first time a man came at me with a fist I was eighteen. I passed out. Not from his fist though. I’d passed out drunk. When I woke up all my clothes were on the floor, my legs were spread eagle on his bed, and I was wet and sticky and sore between them. There was a bruise between my shoulder and my breast. He was snoring, asleep back in bed. I stood up and watched him sleep. I remember thinking he is beautiful. He had long blonde feathered hair and an astonishingly fit body. He did Karate. Competitively. In fact his power and beauty were what made me go home with him from the bar. I mean I went out of my way to catch his eye, wag my ass, throw my huge mane of blonde lioness hair around. I pretended I didn’t know how to play pool—which my father had taught me when I was ten—so he could “teach” me. He had blue eyes. Standing there watching him sleep, my legs shaking some, I thought, he is beautiful, and I am not, I am stupid, and drunk, and I deserve this and more.

Then I called my roommate from college at 3:00 A.M. and she and her boyfriend came to get me. I couldn’t find my underwear. I waited for them in the dark and cold morning on the front lawn. He came out before they got to me and punched me in the jaw—not hard enough to call the cops, not soft enough to keep my ear from aching, saying, “You tell anyone you crazy little bitch, I’ll find you.” He smiled. He handed me my underwear.

I waited for my roommate to pick me up. I heard a dog bark. I smelled cow shit from Lubbock stockyards. I picked at a scab on my arm like a kid.You’re no victim if you are a drunk ass slut. I didn’t cry. I swallowed it whole.

I didn’t tell anyone. In fact, later that year? I went home with him again. On purpose.

Purple crayon.

Coffee mug.

Vodka.

Underwear.

The second time a man hit me I was in college. The man was a poet. A pacifist. A hippie. Somehow I believed things like that could matter. But he had a hair trigger rage in him. His father had been career military and hit him all through boyhood. The rage in him sat like the crouch of dead dreams in his fingers. Poems came out. And that shot to the bridge of my nose. Probably that’s what drew me to him. It was familiar.

Twice in my life I’ve been homeless, both times the result of emotional trauma. Both times I woke up under overpasses with no pants or underwear, vomit everywhere, a throbbing pain between my legs extending to my asshole. I’m assuming I was raped. But where do you put the story of rape when there’s no man to blame? I put it the only place I knew how to. I put it back into my body.

Belt.

Barf bag.

Baseball.

Purple Crayon.

I’m trying to tell you something here, but it’s starting to sound like what I’m saying is that I deserved these violences. Let me be clear. I did not. No one does. Ever. But when women tell how it is for them, when they self narrate their ordinary lives, it’s instantly sucked up by the culture—there’s already a place waiting for the story. A place where the story gets annulled.  It’s 2012 and I’m still reading about what the girl or woman was wearing that night. Or how she should hold aspirin between her legs. Or how she shouldn’t say the word “vagina” on the floor of congress. Or how a friend at a bar wants the sob stories to end. What I’m trying to tell you is that violence against girls and women is in every move we make, whether it is big violence or small, explicit or hidden behind the word father. Priest. Lover. Teacher. Coach. Friend. I’m trying to explain how you can be a girl and a woman and travel through male violence like it’s part of what living a life means. Getting into or out of a car. A plane. Going through a door to your own home. A church. School. Pool. It can seem normal. It can seem like just the way things are.

To be honest, the first reason I understand the complexities of male violence against girls and women is that I went to college and read a shit ton of books—and even that wasn’t enough education—I went to graduate school, where finally, finally, the books that I read and the films that I watched and the art that I experienced and the teachers that I had showed me just how not normal male violence against girls and women—or boys and men—is. Ever. And yet at the same time, the more conscious I became, the more I also understood that the pervasiveness of that violence has saturated the entire culture. It’s both omnipresent, and unbelievably invisible in its dispersed and sanctioned forms. So many times the cult of good citizenship covering over the atrocities of girls and boys. Mothers who go numb. Counselors who ask the wrong questions. Coaches and priests and teachers whose desires are costumed and sanctified by their authority. Neighbors who go blind and deaf. Paying bills. Drinking lattes.

The second reason I understand is that I am alive. Still. Differently.

It wasn’t that I did not understand the violences against me were wrong. I did. Even at three years of age. It was that I thought I deserved it, and possibly worse:  that deserving it, I could withstand it. Mightily. Heroically. You see? As a righteously indignant defense. I could take it. As good as if I was somebody’s son. It was a choice.

When my father raised his hand to me in our garage at eighteen, I said, “Do it.”

When the poet punched me in the nose in my pick-up truck at a stop light, I said, “Get the fuck out of my car or I will kill you.” And I meant it.

I’m telling you this because I know I’m not the only one who came of age like this. Up and through male violence. I’m telling you because there are all the things that need to be done “out there” to stop it. But then there are also all the things that needed to be done in me. To stop it.

Listen, these are not the sad stories. Worse things happened to me. Those aren’t the sad stories either.  These stories don’t carry the pathos to signify culturally in my culture. These stories I’m telling you are commonplace. That’s the point. They just happen and you live them and as you go you have to decide who you want to be.

Victim.

Slut.

Bitch.

Crayon.

Baseball.

Belt.

When I was thirteen, in Jr. High, my best friend Emory was beaten and sodomized in the boy’s locker room at school by some sadistic members of the football team. Because he was gay. Or at least that’s what they were aiming at. In truth, Emory had not yet finished discovering his own sexual self. Like my sister, Emory suffered rectal damage the rest of his life. They used a baseball bat. Emory says, I’ll never be in any kind of relationship. Emory says, my chance at being with anyone, a family, feeling OK, died that day. Emory was also a swimmer, and so after swim practice, sometimes we’d sit in the parking lot waiting for our moms to pick us up and drink vodka from a flask an older girl swimmer had bequeathed to me. I never knew what to say about what happened. I didn’t even understand it until we were adults. I’m only glad we are still in contact – writing. The tether of words when the world isn’t safe like it was supposed to be.

The boys who committed this brutality were never charged. Emory couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone, and anyhow, at that time, there were no laws on the books to protect us anyway. Also, he was instructed by his father’s lawyer that the term “rape” was not available to him in this situation.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

Barf bag.

I’m a writer. It’s all I really know how to do, besides being a wife and mother. I consider myself a success story. Because I am alive I mean, and because I think writing and books and art are the reason. As a writer, I’m not so sure I see much difference in the storylines for women and girls who enter the field. I see that some art is rewarded for being “universal,” and it is written by men. Other art is deemed confessional. Or sentimental. Or too subjective. And it is written by women. I see that straight white men are published in prestigious venues more often than women. I see that women are told by editors and agents and publishers to take explicitly sexual or violent or subjective language out of their work unless they can bend the language toward the culture in a way that will sell. These are gendered terms, laden with a force as real as my father’s. I write my heart out. I do. For better or worse. I write my heart out because my heart, well, she was almost taken from me. Every year of my life until now. It’s something I can “do.” A verb. Something that has at least a chance of interrupting another girl or boy’s story with other options. Write. Make art. Find others. It’s a choice.

Listen, I know this is a bit of a dreary story. But whenever I get told that, by friends, or agents, or editors, or publishers, I think, if this dreary story is hard for you to live with, how are we supposed to live with you?

When my father was thirty, he had all of his teeth pulled. Just bad genes with regard to teeth, I guess.  Early dentures. When he came home from the surgery he turned all the living room lights off, became part of the couch, and turned the television on. It was a horrible week waiting for his mouth to heal. I don’t know how to say it—things went too dark and horribly submerged. If my mother or I spoke, he yelled, but we could barely understand him. Laughter and crying kept getting caught and confused in my throat. My mother made soup. Mashed potatoes. Ice cream. I drew on the walls in my room. It was like his rage had gone underground, under the beds, the house, the dirt. But we could feel it, pulsing.  Pervading everything.

They sent his teeth home with him. I never understood that. I just know I stole one. A molar. Off white as a baseball and like a wrong pearl. I have it still.

Sometimes I think about the children that didn’t come out of me. Four. Three of them were zygotes. The zygotes were sucked out of me in what can best be described as a process involving a hoover upright old-school vacuum. That’s what it always looked like to me. Though medical technology has advanced since I was in my teens and twenties.  And yet it’s 2012 and I keep reading about ideas like forced sonograms where the newly or barely pregnant woman is made to watch. I saw a congressman interviewed who actually said, “Well, no one can really be made to ‘watch,’ the woman could just close her eyes.’” While a camera wand is shoved up her. It makes me think of the film A Clockwork Orange.  It makes me think how yes we are forced to watch, every day of our lives, we are forced to watch how our culture still doesn’t get what it means to live every moment of a life in the body of a woman.

Baseball.

Purple crayon.

Underwear.

Belt.

The zygotes that did not become children—I think about them. Who would they be? Would they have lived? It’s a question I feel I’ve earned the right to, since one of the children who came through my body died—nothing wrong with my body or hers, sometimes babies just die. Though for more than a decade I believed it was my body that killed her. My body I’d made into a war zone to mirror the culture as I saw it. When Christians in particular talk to me about “killing babies” and abortions, in my head I think, trust me, I know the difference between a dead baby and a zygote. Once a white Christian woman with shellacked blonde hair and the smallest green eyes I’d ever seen told me I was going to hell on my way in to Planned Parenthood. I thought to myself, lady, I’ve been there and back. Only it was called “family.”

Those zygotes, would they be boys? Girls? Would I have survived? I had no money during that part of my life. I stole food and did things I’m not proud of so that I could eat and have shelter and go to school. I also worked three jobs. And still I needed food stamps, just to stay alive. What would they have eaten, the three zygotes, where would they have lived? Would there have been a man under the beds, house, down in the dirt, his rage and violence waiting? Would I have let him in the door, his face so familiar I couldn’t recognize it?

I carry deep shame in my body for the zygotes. I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy” to have had an abortion. Or two. Or four. And it’s not just me. Other women. Republicans. Democrats.  Unaffiliated women. Atheists. Christians. Muslims. Buddhists. Armies of us walking around carrying our body secrets. Our shame over the zygotes. Or maybe there’s something deeper than shame—maybe there’s a second self I had to kill in order to live. The Lidia who believed she deserved it. Could take it. Should. It was a choice.

My father’s tooth is in a pink plastic box that was my mother’s. Inside it too, a lock of my hair and two of my baby teeth and that little bracelet they used to give babies that spells out L-I-D-I-A. I’m the one who put my father’s tooth in there after my mother died. I don’t know why. Sometimes I get it out and look at it – hold it in the palm of my hand. So small. The man who terrorized us. His DNA. So large the culture that let him.

I am a survivor of sexual abuse and male violence. I’ve had three abortions. I also had one baby girl that died the day she was born. I have a husband and a son now. My husband plays cello, and makes films and writes, and in the evening he hits the heavy bag; he’s proficient at Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu.  My son can’t throw a baseball properly to save his life. His favorite color is purple. He draws and draws. Me, between them, I am alive, unflinchingly.

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More from this author at TheRumpus.net