dear baby....

... For all the ways that I love you, I understand, a little better, how God loves me.


I do not love you because of what you can do.

You can do much more now than when you were brand-new, when the heavy musk of the divine lingered on the top of your sweet head, in the crease of your neck, in the breath of you, when I could press your sweet palms and soles to my nose and breathe in the holy fragrance of Spirit-in-womb still glowing between your fingers and toes, and know that to hold you was to cradle the presence of the Divine. You have, literally, come a long way, baby. Still, compared to what I can do, you can't do much. It's really not about that anyway.

I don't love you for the ways you might make me feel, or for the ways in which you might reflect me back to myself.

Sure, I love when when I smile at you, and the joy bubbles up in you, which bubbles up in me, and we spill joy all over each other, and you take pleasure in my pleasure, and I, in yours; I love you when I am made somber by your pain, and you, by mine, even if you don't understand what these pains and pleasures are, outside of their presence in my face before yours. I love you when you're present with me, and I love you when you're not, when I search for your eye but you're distracted by something shiny across the room, or by your own senses of pain or pleasure or discomfort or anger or weariness or hunger.

I'll be honest, baby, and say that I still don't really understand the depths to which love responds to pain. But know that whether you know my presence in your pain, or you feel alone: I love you.

I love you when we simply share a space and natter back and forth, with lulls between as I measure flour, or as you gum a spatula and kick the entire eighteen-pack of eggs onto the dog, who is furtively chewing on your favorite pacifier (again). I love you because I know you; because I know what it means to know you, even though what it means to know is, in comparison, mostly beyond your understanding.

I love you when you are fiery and fighting, and I absolutely joy to imagine what fires you'll fight; I love you when you melt into me, idly knead my bottom lip in a handful, forming baby knowings of comfort.

I love you when you kick me. I will love you the same when you stop.

My love for you is unaffected by your desire toward forward or backward. Whether you ever learn to maneuver yourself toward that shiny object across the room, or not. However long it takes you. Whether you ever get there. You were made to reach for more, and I will help you do it. But if, for whatever reasons, you never get there: I love you.

I don't love you because you're doing the "right" things, either. Ideas of what right and wrong might mean are beyond your understanding. And even as you come to understand more about them: every time you fail, I love you.

Not I still love you. 

Not I love you anyway. 

Not drag yourself back to me and prove your worth before I let you sully my arms.

Every time you fail: I love you.

Because you are. I love you because you are here. Not that you are here, but you're here! My day is brighter when I see your face; my heart lifts whether I am in the presence of your laughter or your tears; I simply delight that I am with you. Because you are mine. You are always mine; you will always be mine, from the foundations of the world, in life or death, you belong to me; the divine between your fingers is held sacred in the palm of my hand.

My love for you is not a feeling: it is a union, held in laughing tension or solemn trust. It reflected in tandem, one in each other, but it does not change, based on what you reflect. And it cannot be contained or expressed fully in this note, with these words, in this language.

I just thought you should know.

the b-i-b-l-e: no.

There has to be grace for those who were violated by the bible.

For those who panic when it opens, for whom the split-page format quickens breath and makes the skin tingle. The poetry format of Psalms buzzes white noise in my ears, the words of Jesus in glaring red toward the reader, blare in my head as from a scary, spittle-bearded wild man whose hands move too fast, too far. The pebbled dark leather cover; the gold page edges. Words screamed from pulpits in booming, dramatic vibrato, hurled toward the demons in the back of the room, where I hid from everything it fueled, mentally tunneling myself into the upper corner of the baptistry and counting the minutes until I could run outside into the twilight.

I hate the Bible.

I do.

I hate it.

I hate it.

It infuriates me.

A lifetime hemmed in by guilt-scaffolding, gouging and smashing and pillaging in the name of holiness or repairing the sinful human condition; more like a tent-fumigation, every single inch suffocated in the dark, poison in the name of life.

I can't tolerate it.

To paraphrase a fellow struggler: every single lie of my life is footnoted with Bible verses.

It speaks death to me. Striped into my skin on the edge of a belt. Streaked across my person, trails of sweat and sebum. Still and quiet as death, stop swinging your feet as it boomed against my ears. Taped to the bathroom mirror at five-year-old eye-level (honor your father and mother) by people invested in breakage. SOMEBODY is screaming at me through this book, I knew, but it is not God.

This is not God. I had no other words.

Its words bound and gagged me. Imbued my entire spirit with guilt and standard and shortfall. For me, the bible is strictly punitive: a roadmap of all the ways in which I am evil. Whether by all the ways we were all born bad, or by the ways life "made" me "bad" - the bitten apple, or the chewed gum, or you can't take the chocolate out of the milk, or the cake with just a little bit of dog shit baked into it, but go ahead, take a bite, because it's just a little bit of dog shit around smarmy youth-pastor smiles, oh my god, bite me so hard, purity culture, and needless to say, they did not say shit, but I will, because it is shit. 

All of the ways in which God is becoming new to me... redemption is deep, and wide. It is not the instant peace it seems from the perspective of a person who has never known its fragrance; uprooting and shedding light is not the fairy picnic you imagine. The work of redemption, not strictly mine anymore to feebly attempt, requiring that I be, which is (speaking of tension) equally the hardest and most natural thing I've ever been able to be, with God. Present and attuned and aware and listening. Painful, two-steps-back feeling. So much deeper, so much wider than I could imagine.

God is speaking.

Maybe someday, he'll speak to me from the pages of that book.

But not today.

Probably not tomorrow, either.

"untitled" sounds very pretentious; let's call it "Starbucks," since that's where I am.

Telling a story is a dicey thing. You're not just telling a story, or your story; your story is often interwoven with the stories of other people, who may not want their stories told, or who may not agree with the ways in which you interpret their stories, or who object to the ways in which you believe their stories have intersected with your own. More often than not, you're telling one side of a story which has many sides; you can own "your side," but the story is bigger than you are.

When your stories involve your family, the waters are further muddied. And I struggle with this, so very much. My family are mine, and I love them. But I love them guardedly, from a distance. I was chuckling to a coworker the other day about the existence of this blog, as he noted a particular entry and said your parents probably loved reading that one. And I replied, without thinking: they don't know I write. They're not allowed to know me. They kinda had their chances, and they kinda blew them all. 

I didn't realize that I'd given up on them ever knowing me until I said those words aloud. Maybe they know; maybe they don't; maybe they're reading this right now, though I doubt it. 

Part of me knows that they're intimidated by me, confused, unable to figure me out; part of me knows that they know that's the way I want it; the wounded parts of me are proud of, and guilty of, the power this knowledge gives me. Part of me knows that, were I to let them in, part of them would admire it (for lack of a better word); the deeply wounded parts of them would respond to the parts of me that have been unwilling to keep their secrets hidden away. Sometimes, a person needs permission to feel their own pain. But I can't be their permission; I can't stand in their pain with them. Just no. I can't imagine taking on one more burden for these people, can't imagine letting them into anything else I have. I could tell you stories - and it might sound narcissistic, but believe me, it isn't - I could tell you stories of the ways in which years of my burdened silence kept our family's image intact. I can't be their permission to heal any more than I was able to survive being their permission to close ranks around sickness and sin. That's only one side of a story, though; years of silence from every member of my family turned all of our wounds inward, especially the wounds inflicted within our own walls. They still live wounded, static in the immediacy of their injuries, years and years and years arrested at traumas they blink away from, if they ever surface at all. 

I have always wanted to blow the doors off of every ugliness and secret and burden I've carried around. I want to stand on mountaintops and fill horizons with every word of all of the things that were not my fault. Selfishly, though, in order to hear it echo back from the heavens to my own ears; all I knew of sharing was to try to rid myself of the scourge of the abused child, to try to find absolution in making it mean something good. My poor mother, who conflates secrecy with privacy, who gave birth to a mouthy, telling person, who has jerked me up by the arm and hissed at me more than once you do not betray the family; you do not tell things outside the family. The Family. Mafioso. Italian and all. Would you believe - I remember the first time she ever became aware that I write: I was five years old, and wrote some cheesy little essay that was published in the newspaper and netted me $25, which I spent on notebooks and pretty pencils. Her reaction, deeper than the surprise and happiness she expressed on my behalf: apprehension. Even then, I think she was afraid: she'd identified a perspective attached to a voice within her own ranks. 

I intended to write about grace, when I started writing this. Grace, ever-present, brand-new to me, life-changing, mind-blowing; hope, which I am so afraid to lose, because I have always, always, always been without hope. It scares me, to realize how fundamentally I function from a baseline of survival and nothing more; it shakes me, how grace and hope are secondary, and how I have to remind myself every single day that things are different now; this is what you know; new every morning is, in fact, a real thing, not just a promise, but a discipline in sweet hope; remember? remember? 

As much as my family has brought about death in my life, over and over again, I can't help but carry them into grace and hope with me. I might never be able to let them know it, but it's not my grace or hope to bestow anyhow. The stories of secrets, burdens, deaths flung into the horizon are flung, east to west, into the hope and grace that echo unto themselves. Grace for me, as one of them; hope for us all. 

jadis

C. S. Lewis writes
of Charn: a dead world, undead; decimated, bones
made holy with time and wind and fire still shut-up with ringing
in rote habits of circulation, blood-currents preserved
in false sleep for ill intent; these bones are not dead: they shriek
in dog-whistle frequencies, in treble presence of spirit
audible only to those whose living ears lay bare of any other noise
until the stirring
of vengeful queenly presence summoned
at the sounding of a bell
at the will
of a boy.

If rape is to be contained by symbolism, it is this:
the sex act, as allegory to the infilling of the Holy Spirit, turned infidel,
brutalized aloft, to the cross, and defected by God himself; it is suckling intent
laid to rest in womb-as-sarcophagus;
it is the full rage of God or gods behind each brittle consonant
of the word blasphemy against my teeth and lips.
It is Jadis's Deplorable Word,
casting a city to slow ruin
in defense against its conquest.
It is the heart-rhythm which continues unbidden after death,
the nerves electrified
by void habit evermore:

this death is not dead. 
this death cannot be made dead. 

this death is not dead. 
this death cannot be made dead. 

this death is not dead. 
this death cannot be made dead. 

as Jadis, forbidden apples will render a bloodstream electric evermore,
but in death-as-life promises of immortality
refracted against skin turned snow-white by horror;
yet beneath, a full, sacred rhythm belies such undeath:

shall these dead bones yet live again. 
shall these dead bones yet live again. 
shall these dead bones yet live again. 

why women are responsible for our safety, and it doesn't mean what you think it means.

I'm not trying to blame you, or anything, but maybe when you made him mad - maybe that wasn't the best thing to do? I don't know. (a former friend, when I told her I'd yelled at him previously for groping me.)

Huh, that sucks. But I don't know what you want me to say. And you know what? I'd rather be in your shoes than mine. My job is killing me lately. (a former teacher and friend.)

You're a grown-ass woman; what do you want? You chose this industry. You walked in there with lions. Now you know what comes with the territory. Suck it up. (a classmate.)

You a fucking badass? yeah? show me how fucking badass you are now. (him.)

________

I want to say a few things.

As before, I am discussing rape in terms of male-on-female rape, while acknowledging that men are victimized as well, and that female perpetrators also commit rape against men and women.

I am not in the business of relegating women (particularly survivors of rape) to perpetual victim status. I say that fiercely and directly to every single person (most of whom happen to be men) who accuse me of it. I love and appreciate men. I don't hate men. It's silly that I'd even need to say that. But there you go.

I want to be able to raise a fist and roar in solidarity with those who assert a woman should be able to dance drunk on a table stark-naked and expect that she won't be raped, groped, or even made uncomfortable by the men surrounding her! yeah yeah yeah! 

But I can't. Because while it's entirely true, it's also true that any person walking around among other people is already vulnerable to the evil in the people around him/her; if any person has compromised his/her ability to control his/her environment, s/he has become even more vulnerable to the evil in the people around him/her.

Yes, women should be careful (whatever that means, as though it were a one-size-fits-all Solution). Because we are human beings, and because human beings - men and women - should be careful around each other. Because there will always be human beings who are invested in taking criminal advantage of other human beings.

Women are responsible for their own safety to the same extent that men are responsible for their own safety. Because safety, and responsibility for safety, is not a gendered concept. Let me please yell that, all black-in-the-eyes because I am pulll-ENTY pissed off about how this vague concept of "safety" is twisted to be used against rape victims in particular:


SAFETY. IS. NOT. A. GENDERED. CONCEPT. 


Every human being should refrain from making choices that diminish his/her capacity to control his/her environment. Wherever you are, there are usually other human beings present who might steal a wallet, drug a drink, snatch your jewelry, steal your car, commit a sex offense, punch you in the mouth if you bump into them, accidentally run you over in the parking lot, steal your smartphone, damage or destroy your property. Because human beings - men and women - are shady as hell. And they will trample you, to their own ends.

________

I wish we didn't live in a world where personal power, so destroyed by rape, is so inversely-inflated by people who assume that a rape victim should have been able to find ways to prevent it from happening, and is therefore to blame for it.

Surely rape culture can't be that pervasive, right?

Surely women have more power against rape than that, right?

There should be no set of expectations that women protect ourselves more than our male counterparts. And there is certainly no special grace afforded women who are raped in spite of whatever "precautions" they may have taken. All of us - men and women - want to avoid victimization. We all work at it. All of us. We do what we can. But none of us - men or women - have a moral responsibility to avoid becoming victims of other people's evil. To be targeted by a perpetrator, in any capacity, is not a victim's moral failure. Ever.

It's true that if a woman is targeted by a rapist, it is not ever her fault. It is a rapist's fault. Period.

It is also true that there are behavioral and practical precautions that women can take which might possibly lessen the potential that they'll be raped.

It is also true that there are zero precautions available to a woman to prevent her from being targeted to begin with. Clothing words energy weaponry brightly-lit spaces traveling in groups blah blah blah - none of this matters to a determined rapist.

It is also true that, of all the specific "rape preventatives" and weapons available to women, not a single one of them will dissuade a determined rapist. Not a single one.

Why didn't you fight. Because he might have killed me.
Why did you fight. Because he might have killed me.
Why didn't you carry mace. Because he might have seen it and killed me.
Why didn't you carry a gun. Because he might've gotten it from me and killed me.
Why didn't you have a rape whistle or something? Because he might've killed me before I had a chance to use it. 

Or. 

Why didn't you fight. I did.
Why did you fight. I didn't.
Why didn't you stay in a well-lit area. I was raped in an office.
Why did you mace him? Don't make him angry.
She shouldn't have had a gun. She panicked. Of course he's gonna wrestle it away from her.
She used that rape whistle, but nobody heard.
Why did you wear a burqua, in the middle of a street?
Why did you wear a sari, on a crowded bus?
Why did you let them tie you naked to a tree?
Why were you wearing an acolyte robe in the vestry?
Why were you wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt, the only woman in a kitchen full of men?
Why were you wearing a bathing suit, in an uncle's bedroom?
Why were you wearing a sparkly mini-dress, in a club bathroom?
Why were you sleeping naked in your own bed?
Why were you wearing a school uniform, in a principal's office?
Why were you wearing an Easter dress, in a Sunday school classroom?
Why were you wearing a hospital gown, in a nursing home?
Why were you wearing a business suit, in an executive's office?
Why were you wearing a onesie, in a crib?

Why did you make eye contact?
Why didn't you look him in the eye?
Why did you say hello? why did you remain silent?
Why did you respond to advances? why didn't you respond? why didn't you demand he stop?
Why did you get angry when he touched? why did you ignore it? why did you play along to keep him calm, praying the elevator door would please hurry up and open?
Why did you walk away? stay put? look away? bite your lip? tear up? turn purple? remain stoic? refuse to cry? weep like a baby? refuse to react? react loudly? scream? plead? didn't plead? 

Why did you press charges? Hardly ever goes to trial. Hardly ever convicted. Waste of time and money. Just make him angrier. Just make yourself forget about it.
Why didn't you press charges? Oh my god, what's wrong with you? How many other women? little girls? Are you that selfish? Your fault. Letting other women carry the public/legal burden for you. 

Nobody's blaming women who are raped. But think about it: When beer commercials tell the audience to "drink responsibly," to plan ahead and designate a driver to avoid a DUI, that is an acceptable message, but expecting women to plan ahead for themselves to avoid a potential assault isn't?  [I cannot think of a clearer example of victim-blaming than to conflate a victim's victimization with a potential criminal action.]

Even though I know it's rambly and I'm trying hard to keep the rage and pain of it under control because I swear my brain is rotting in all this.... Can you see? It's not that there isn't a lot to unpack when talking about all the parts of rape, including the parts that are uncomfortable with regard to personal responsibility. It's not that nobody's allowed to assert that women, like men, should take all the precautions we can to protect ourselves, and that women, like men, should make choices that enhance our ability to control our environment. These things should be said. Absolutely.

It's just that any discussion of womens' responsibility in a discussion of rape and rape culture is already skewed against women. Because we are blamed for our rapes before they even occur, in the instant they occur, and for the rest of our lives afterward. Because when it comes down to it, there is not a damn thing any woman can do to prevent the hammer from falling on her face. Because it's a women's issue - how many times have I heard that shit in the past three years. Your problem. Her problem. I don't know what you want me to say about this. 

How can we ever really talk about these things in such a climate?

How can we unpack every single bag about men's and women's responsibilities? and safety? and the mixed signals human beings can send? and the ways in which we know other humans can interpret them, alongside the ways in which we know they can fully control themselves against a little flirtation? How can we talk about what messages the woman in Spain was sending when she performed oral sex on 24 men for a cheap bottle of alcohol? How can we discuss how empowered or disadvantaged she may have felt? How can we discuss the roles of every single man and woman in that bar that night? How can we discuss the signals we send (and don't send) in sending/receiving nude images from other people or engage in other overtly-sexual behaviors? How can we discuss our motivations behind these actions?

It feels completely impossible to discuss how these things fit into rape culture when the entire thing is steeped in a climate of blame.

I want to be able to say this: that, in the same way all men are responsible for rape culture but not all men are to blame for rape culture, all women are responsible for our safety but not to blame when someone chooses to violate our safety.

Sadly, I don't think we all agree on this point.

But it is true. And I should be able to say it. And I hope that any man worth a damn would please just take a minute and reflect on it. Please? Please do it. Think about what the former statement means for you, as a man; now please, think about what the latter statement means for me, as a woman, in light of what the former statement means for you.

The most frustrating thing (currently) is the reality of that previous little paragraph, though: if there is any antidote for patriarchy and rape culture, it will come in pointing out all the very real ways in which patriarchy and rape culture hurt men. Not women. Not me.

Like a toddler roaring out to battle with a paper-towel tube; like a hobbit waddling out to the gates of Mount Doom. Can't even.

wait.

I am so impatient for my words to come back that I can hardly stand to read.

I am so impatient for my wonder to come back that I can hardly stand myself in the world.

I am so impatient to feel small and reverent again that sitting in a forest would break my heart; I need a forest to sit in.

I am so impatient for strength that I can hardly rest.

I am so impatient.

But there are deep breaths and there is focus, and there's no room for impatience here.

Impatience is not for a grown woman; it's the luxury of children. It's the charm and frenzy of little people whose lives are still just small backyards, with no capacity for enduring long swathes of landscape. No understanding for what it means to wait, to do the work of waiting, in a life so short and small.

So. I'm waiting.

Enduring. Focusing. Breathing. Practicing these things. Practicing it all.

It's a crazy thing, a weird thing, how waiting also means resting: a weird thing, to have to learn how to rest, as though resting were something to resist. To learn that part of resting means to temporarily set aside the things that derail the waiting. A crazy thing, that some things are not for right now, and that's okay. The sweetest relief I've ever known in my life, to allow the focus to shift from DO IT RIGHT ASAP to pace yourself for the long-haul, kid.  

Because God is changing my life. I am changing my life. And none of this can be done quickly. Can't be forced. Can't be made into something it isn't.

This will not be right without waiting.

I will not be whole without waiting.

I will not survive this without waiting.

This is it; The Big One, as they say.

I will either die in half-wait, or be made invincible by learning how to wait; this will either kill me, or it won't. It's all I can do.

So I'll wait to speak, and I'll read the conversations I can't yet join, let them help build their truth in me.

Trust inspiration to the times when it smacks me like a semi, and trust that, someday, it will woo me again, if I wait.

Let the dust settle, let the bleeding slow, let the scars form, wait for them to become the words I know are blooming and kicking inside me.

Sit with the doubts in a concrete jungle. Say them out loud, every last one, to every last letter, and wait.

Recognize the work of remembering what I'm learning. Remind myself of what's new. Recite it, over and over and over and over again, a new language, richer and fuller and deeper than I ever imagined. Work to remember, every day, how old languages, as mine as my own name, can turn me back toward death before I even realize what's happening.

I don't think the old way of words will never come back; it's turning new leaves, as a book or a tree, as I wait.

The wonder swells up to my throat, and I begin to remember myself again, as I wait, and all I can say is oh God, thank you. thank you. thank you. 

The presence of God seeps from the hand-made, cracked foundations of this concrete jungle; it cannot help itself. It betrays its inability to contain a God who is more than his own strength.

The air is heavy with Everything for which I wait.

I don't wait alone. Which is kind of the whole point.