In my life I have tried always to be understanding and kind. I am the poster child for “You never know what might be going on at home.” I have given my fair share of grace and more to situations where I was grievously injured and spent years trying to figure out why I was constantly being used as a doormat for everyone’s poor choices. I was always made to feel so ashamed about my situation when it wasn't my situation to be responsible for to begin with.
This is about to be really uncomfortable for a lot of people, but I need you all to understand something. I am passionate about women’s rights, affordable housing, police accountability, and support programs because of my mothers story, and then the story I heard from my own grandmothers lips during my divorce, and then my story which is a collective of not only my own trauma, but the generational trauma I have experienced through the limited choices of the women in my life.
If you are a traditional spouse and that life is everything you love and at home and you have a spouse who supports your efforts fully and always treats you with kindness and respect, then I’m really happy for you. Truly. That is partnership. But that is not the case for most other women, and its something I have seen with my own eyes over the course of my life.
I am a liberal woman because of the men I’ve had to deal with. I am a pro-choice, pro- education, crazy-ass liberal because the men in my life made me that way.
“I was tame I was gentle till the circus life made me mean.”-Taylor Swift, Poetess and Goddess.
When I was young, my mom was only able to work if my dad wanted her to. When he was done with her working she would have to leave with no notice - a spot many women were put in. She was asked if she had her husband’s permission to get a job. Employers, while not trying to be cruel, understood that many wives could not be relied upon. And in a lot of cases, that is true. Child care was nearly non-existent. Sick children fell to the mothers. Men could not be expected to participate. It was a reality that left many women who desired more than just work and motherhood to feel depressed and stagnated. It does kind of make it hard to build a resume with no references. She started selling AVON to make a little extra money. I fondly remember being settled into my orange plastic seat on the back of her bicycle, toting around her bag of goods and going door to door. I would sometimes do the foot work for her by running to loop the new catalogues on the door handles so we could deliver them faster. My father was very abusive. He was also a terrible alcoholic with a wandering eye. He rarely stayed at a job for long periods of time back then. It wasn’t uncommon for him to quit a job without having a place to go. It was my mom’s job to figure out how to pay the bills, often heavily relying on my grandparents to help her out.
I wont go into all the gory details because some people attached to the story don’t deserve that, but my dad had an affair and left my mom destitute. This is also unfortunately the same story for his first wife, he left her for my mother. He quit paying for the house, we lost it. We had to move to section 8 housing where the traumas continued due to the state of things. We had to also give up our pets because they were not allowed and Napoleon, my childhood cat had to go live with my grandmother. As a person who has always been exceptionally attached to animals, this was very very hard on me. I had to change schools and demographics. I remember the first time that I noticed I didn’t look like all the other kids in my neighborhood. I will say though that the women in that neighborhood looked out for me just like I was one of their own. One time, I got attacked by a teenage boy walking home after school and it was my friend Nadia’s mother, who ran up on him with a baseball bat saving me from sexual assault. I was 7 at the time. My dress torn and my knees skinned, I cried in her lap till my mom got home, she braided my hair and added little beads so that Nadia and I would look alike.
Between the mothers on Dooley drive, there was a camaraderie, a spirit of warriorhood that seeped into my bones. All around me there were fatherless children. When fathers did arrive on the scene - kind of like the times my dad would show up at my mom’s apartment drunk - the women would often bear the abuse to protect their children. The projects are a hot bed of criminal activity because people are literally fighting to survive, there is no law and order out there.
I also want to add for posterity’s sake, that I rarely saw black people from the other parts of the county buying drugs in my hood. It was always white suburbanites in their Subarus clutching their pearls. There is no business if there is no demand, and the demand largely came from white middle-class people looking to party. The same people who would roll over as fast as possible to incriminate the people they bought the drugs from when they were caught. You didn’t tell on people to the police. That much was understood. Drugs were a part of the culture. They were used to escape the misery of roach-infested and moldy apartments, and they were used to earn a living by some. It was quite an eduction for a seven-year-old staying home alone after school until my mom got home. I was a traditional latch-key kid.
My only friend was a hotline I could call to talk to an adult if I felt scared or alone. That was child care in the hood, a 1-800 number. We lived on food pantry finds and food stamps. We didn’t have a car and would walk the three miles to the grocery store so we could afford to take a cab back with our stuff. What my mother had to go through to get herself together is a travesty that every person in America needs to know about. She walked to college until her teacher who happened to live a few blocks away started giving her a ride. She persevered to get herself an education and car, and then a job, and she still died poor. While our relationship was not easy - in many ways we failed each other - she was a goddamn hero. Was there ever any child support.....no... there most certainly was not, but he was working hard for his new family so those kids wouldn’t starve so I guess there’s some points to be had for that. (sarcasm) Not that I’m saying that their lives were any better than mine. They were not really, just a different deck of used casino cards. I won’t say that he never did anything for us. In his later years, especially following his sobriety, he has shown up for us in ways he didn’t before. He is aware of the mistakes he made and for that I’ll give him his flowers. I don’t really talk to my step-siblings much. There is love there, or at least on my end. We all, however, live very different lives. We were once just neighborhood kids together, playing in the dirt in the evenings and jumping ramps on the bike they built for me out of spare parts, then everything very violently changed. In the span of the light changing to dark, our universe collapsed into a black hole of despair.
After having had some traumatic experiences with police officers (Picture it. Circa nineteen eighty something and the police are at your house because your mother is being held at gunpoint.) I got the pleasure (sarcasm again) of seeing my friend’s father beaten down by the cops for walking black. And no, he didn’t resist. He had a Walkman on and was out for a run, when he didn’t hear them calling for him to stop, they full-on tackled him and beat him for 20 minutes. He had no record. He was just a construction worker trying to get his family out of the hood. He spent the next six months with his mouth wired shut, and his wife was forced to work three jobs. Then when she was called into the housing authority to renegotiate her rent, it tripled because she was making too much money to live there. No matter how hard you worked, the goal posts where forever being pushed farther out of reach. For every gain, a new obstacle. They system isn’t designed for you to win. We witnessed the power-drunk behavior of men in uniforms on the daily. A cop shot a dog right in front of where we were playing as children. How much trust in law enforcement do you think that created? You can bet your ass this girl has never stayed with a man who has a gun obsession, nor would I ever consider a long term relationship with one. Sorry folks,but that will not be me. I’ve been on the business end of a pistol far too many times in my life to ever even consider it. I wouldn’t even be with a man who hunts for sport, because I can’t ever trust that he won’t use that weapon to kill me. It’s not about their behavior as much as it about my experiences. I will not tolerate being gas lit into uncomfortable situations because people refuse to understand any point of view that isn’t their own, even though it has been always expected of me to be tolerant.
The amount of times I’ve been asked to defend my position was met with, “well not all men...” and while now that I have a truly kind man, I know that it indeed isn’t all men (I think I have a unicorn though), lets just say I’ve had more dealings with the latter to prove there’s enough of them to be cautious. Let me also add that the constant criticism I receive on my husbands behalf because he dares to take care of me emotionally and hold space for me to work thru this mountain of trauma is so telling of toxic masculine culture.
Even after my mom was able to graduate school we could afford to move out of the projects we found a suitable place close to my grandmother. It was still rough, but it was a roof over our heads and she could afford it. The shame that was heaped upon me all my life because it wasn't the best place to live has stayed with me forever. Affordable housing y’all, every single person needs to go see what that is like. I’m currently living in a 125-year-old farmhouse that I am slowly renovating that is more solid and secure than any place I lived after my parents divorced and before I moved out on my own. By the time I moved out, my room had a hole you could see daylight through, and the second story toilet was being held up by pipes. My mom was taking her showers in a dark basement with a water hose shower nozzle rigged to an illegal hot water line to get clean. I moved in with a boyfriend whose mother had left them when they were pretty young teenagers to go live with her boyfriend, and the state of their house wasn't much different, but slightly better than mine. A recollection that at this time makes me shudder.
I can’t speak to the atrocities she endured before her divorce. There were many. They were unspeakable. I do believe that her soul was ripped to pieces. She spent her life trying to be the best she could be, and was constantly judged for not being able to rise to everyone else’s opinions of her. This is a constant struggle for me as well, and I’m a burnout shell of myself because for so long I put my faith in other people’s opinions and looked to them for comfort and validation. The reality is all I ever found in that was more condemnation and resentment. I was failed over and over by the people who were supposed to love me.
When my own spouse from my first marriage decided to cheat on me and blame my poor use of money - something I had always told him I was bad at and wanted him to handle - as he was in the midst of wrecking my discover card taking his girlfriend out in Germany. He left me pregnant and told me that he would never support me and the baby and that I was “fucking up his life.” But, at least for me in that regard, I had taken my mother’s advice and gone back to school to get into a career that could support me and my children if I needed it to. I decided to forgo child support with him because he was always so in my business and trying to control me that I knew if I gave him even one thread of control, I would never have peace. I thought he was a good dad, and I didn’t fight him on joint custody. I regret that, because every time I asked him for help it was a show. It got to the point where I would rather eat glass than ask him for help with dance tuition, because when he did, he would want to know all my personal arrangements and berate me for trying to help my daughter achieve a goal. And wouldn’t you know it? She got a huge dance scholarship because of it. So even as a mother trying to fight for my child’s talent and interests, The overarching theme was that he wanted to control me, and her. I don’t doubt that he loves her, I just don’t think he really understands the true meaning of the word. Many men don’t.
My grandmother sat across from me when I discovered that my husband was cheating on me while deployed and told me that “she never wanted five children.” She didn’t think she was a very good mother. She gave up a lot to get married to a man who would then turn into an alcoholic who could not be relied upon to do anything after about 7 in the evening. My grandmother never drove. Imagine how hard it would be to have an emergency and try to have to get your drunk husband sober enough to deal with it. She didn’t have a bank account with her name on it till 1972, and she didn’t get a credit card either. She wanted to be an artist. She loved her kids. She wouldn’t change having had them, but she told me to get out and never look back. She was the only person I talked to who encouraged me to leave. The church thought I should make myself more desirable. Do things like be awake to greet him at the door after working a twelve-hour shift overnight. I was told that if he was seeking the company of other women, that maybe I needed to see what I was doing wrong. The pastor gave me a copy of “The power of a praying wife,” patted me on the head and sent me on my way. In couples therapy, I endured such grievances as not emptying the lint in the dryer trap, or not filling the ice cube trays up well enough or often enough. I fought long enough to set myself up financially and then, while painful, I let him go. I guess I grew tired of the humiliation. Waking in the middle of the night to find him sitting in his truck talking to her on the phone. The reality of him still expecting me to show him affection when he was doing that. Seeing the countless hours he spent with her on the phone on the cell phone bill, and finding their sexually explicit messages to each other on the computer. It was sickening for me to see as a woman who took care of everything while he was gone six months a year on deployments. My grandmother told me that if she had an option she wouldn’t have stayed. She had really loved him when they married, and she thought he was worth the sacrifice. It was what women did back then. They got married or they were waitresses, teachers, nurses, or secretaries forever. There was no birth control. Childless married women were pitied, and single women regarded as spinsters or whores. I remember she gave me a book when I was 16 about Alice Roosevelt Longworth. I think she was trying to tell me that we should all just be wild women with pet snakes in our hats. Life is more fun when women do what they want. Her father famously said “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice Roosevelt. I cannot possibly do both.”
So excuse me while I throw up when I see politicians talking about how they want to take us back to traditional family values because I don’t see many men rising to the challenge that is required to make traditional homes happy. What I see are an abusive group of man babies who think women’s only role is to have babies and wash their shit-stained drawers for pennies or less.
And folks, I'm not having any more of it.
I have entered my I don’t give a shit about your feelings era. People need to learn that just because something works for you doesn’t mean it works for everyone. My mom went to church every Sunday and still got her ass beat every Monday. She was doing everything she could to endure the criticisms my father had, right down to “she couldn’t meet my needs.” And that’s from his own mouth... his very words, and went on to tell me he thought she was sexually abused or something... never acknowledging that maybe she didn’t trust him enough to make herself vulnerable to him in that way, maybe she was heartbroken that she was getting treated this way and didn’t want to pretend she was happy to service him sexually.
I read a quote a while back that said, people who cause you to bleed don’t get to decide how you clean up the blood.
I apologize that this post is not my most eloquent, but it needs to be said. I have spent my whole life healing from the damage of what happens when the trad wife life goes horribly wrong. I will not stand silently by while ill-informed people in this country use Jesus as a poster boy to oppress women. So, in the wise words of my muse Taylor Swift, “Who’s afraid of little old me? You should be.”
Comments
Post a Comment