#metoo Letter: Dear Dad, STFU About Senator Gillibrand

Dear Dad,

            I’m going to need you to stop complaining to me about Kirsten Gillibrand. While I obviously agree with you about global warming being an important issue, your repetitive complaints which only target female politicians, echo your 2016 “I go easy on you about Hillary” comment. All these comments sound, at best, like low-key sexism and at worst, like a gentle continuation of a lifetime pattern of abuse, both on a national and personal scale.

            When you tell me, over and over, that the senator who is most vocally in support of the #metoo movement isn’t doing a good enough job (For YOU. After one donation and one survey response. Are you KIDDING ME WITH THIS!? I know you see how much work I do very day, why do you feel so entitled not to? And WORSE why do you expect ME to do your work FOR you? I pour countless hours into justice work and I have my own senators to nag!)

            ANYWAY, when you complain about Senator Gillibrand, you are also dismissing the work that I do, both personally and politically, Every. Single. Day. You are dismissing the power and courage of not just me but of every single rape survivor who perseveres although life feels like a constant attack on our bodies. When the sea levels rise, do you imagine we will somehow be LESS vulnerable? Less raped? Do you imagine WE are somehow the ones endangering the planet, by rising up and insisting that---GASP---we be treated as humans?

            But there are a couple of more insidious reasons you should not be low-key trolling me by running down female leaders, particularly Gillibrand.

            When I was in third or fourth grade, I overheard you at least try to rape Mom. You’d both been fighting about sex for weeks and I was WAY too up to date about what was going on in there. I heard Mom scream “No! Don’t! (his name!) Stop! Stop!” and it scared the shit out of me. I started to cry really loud and she said “See? Now you made (me) cry.” And then things seemed to calm down in your room. I don’t know how I understood what was going on, but I did.

            After that, the world changed for me. I became darker, less hopeful. Though Mom denied it to me when I asked a few years later, I know what I heard. You took something profound away from me that night—my trust for the world, my trust for love. I’ve been fighting like hell ever since to get those things back. (Senator Gillibrand?! Also fighting for those things.)

            Fast forward a few years to when I was drugged, raped, and beaten at a party. A few days later, you beat the shit out of me too—just pounding and pounding away and saying “You brought this into our house! You did this!” Meaning, I guess, that that I’d somehow made you and Mom violent by getting raped, even though you’d been that way my whole life.

            That night my friend Bethanne came and got me and I stayed with her family for the night, but I had never felt so deeply and horribly alone. Over the years, that feeling of abandonment and betrayal has come back to me over and over, causing me more panic than any of the original violence. “You are alone, the panic tells me, and the people who say they love you are only waiting to attack and blame you.” You taught my panic how to speak.

            And yet, here I am with the optimism you keep trying to undermine. I did not get this way by accident. It has taken me HUNDREDS of hours of therapy, writing, self-care, activism, and many other kinds of work. I am optimistic and productive by both sheer force of self-creation and as a tribute to the people who have helped me build, thread by thread, vote by vote, scream by scream, the person I am today.

            And not only can you not write ONE GODDAMNED LETTER to Congress, but you have the callousness, cruelty, and entitlement to give me a hard time about how YOUR SENATOR CARES TOO MUCH ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS? PLEASE.

            I have loved you and done my best to forgive you for all of these years without asking you for anything in return. Now I’m asking for two things:

1.      Acknowledge that you got this letter.

2.      Stop retraumatizing me and trying to put me in my place by running down female politicians.

I am not going to give up the fight to own our own bodies. We are not going back and there is nothing you can do about it. If you EVER crap on Senator Gillibrand or any other female leader to me again I can’t promise I won’t FLIP THE FUCK OUT. And NO ONE will get an apology letter.

Love,

Me

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on an MRA, Part Four

In a piece of administrative bad luck, both the Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager and I took sick days on the Monday that followed that Friday snit. The Store Manager was out again on Tuesday so there was no meeting, no resolution. CPAM had clearly been told not to talk to me about anything that wasn’t work related. Why would this be a solution? Barring me from small-talk could only serve to further separate me, not make me feel safe or included. I shouldn’t have to be ready to, for example, confront a rape apologist in order to rate a slot in the cheery work chitchat.

I was scared when I came in and in fact asked if I should leave, but CPAM became friendly again pretty quick., joking about his unicorn-ness and bonding over the music. I even wondered if Friday (and I guess the whole rest of his microagression-o-rama) had been a fluke, just a snit. I felt sheepish to have been so upset.

But then, while we were working happily together in the back room (that darn back room!) with a recently-back-from-vacation grad student, he asked, apropos of nothing, if she had ever heard of the documentary “The Red Pill.”

(FYI: https://dailyreview.com.au/red-pill-watched-dont/61240/)

            I hadn’t heard of the movie, but my hackles went up. I knew that “Red Pill” mentality was one of the Men’s Right’s Activist, deep-Reddit monstrosities that has become the part of the toxic misogynist soup we’ve all been swimming in. In their parlance, “taking the red pill” means realizing that (white) men are actually society’s most oppressed category and that one of the ways to correct this “imbalance” is…rape. I also knew that the Red Pill/ MRA movements are tied intimately with white supremacist movements.

            After a few minutes of him summarizing the “documentary” and me saying “that’s TERRIBLE” a lot of times, he continues to double down on men’s vulnerable status. (NOTE: Men ARE vulnerable and harmed, but he wasn’t realizing it’s heteropatriarchy, not rape survivors, who make the rules.)

            I asked him to change the subject, but he said “I’m not talking to YOU. This isn’t work related.” And stalked away. I walked right after him.

            “I thought we were going to get along,” I said calmly but forcefully, “But you CAN’T be sexist at work. The people you’re talking about are rape apologists.”

“No, they’re not. You’re just saying that because you disagree with them. No matter what I say, you’ll hear what you want to hear. Besides, it isn’t work related.”

            “It IS work related because I don’t feel safe at work. This is a microagression, no, a MACROaggression!”

(As if he would know what either word meant.)

I went back to working on the books, but my body didn’t want to be there. After he evoked the Men’s Rights Activists, the trauma of the 2016 election, the “Lock her up” mobs, the way Trump had recently threatened to forcibly take “Pocohontas” Elizabeth Warren’s DNA to test and mocked the #Metoo movement in the same sentence, it felt like all of that was in the room with me, and it was. The store was presided over by a giant photo of the college’s mascot, a white colonizer, rape and murder in his puppet eyes. How does any woman get through a day on that campus, or in America, or anywhere in all of history?

            I went home. I called the HR hotline, called my therapist, called (ex-wife, BFF) Sweetie. I felt helpless, scared, worthless, panicked, but more than anything else, I felt angry—for the time theft, the money theft, the ELECTION theft brought about by misogyny in general and the MRAs specifically. I felt like I would never be safe anywhere.

Earlier this week, I watched “To All the Little Girls: The Untold Stories of the Sixty-five Million”, https://www.toallthelittlegirlsdoc.com/watch Rebecca Morgan’s story of her work on the 2016 election and it’s aftermath. After the election, Becca was diagnosed with PTSD, and in some ways, I think the whole country has it. I know I do. It’s hard to shake the idea that I have to fight and scrap for survival, that we all do. I don’t know what healing looks like, but I do know that I’ll call out hate (and call HR) just as freely as I call Congress. My heart aches for whatever genuine friendship was there, for having left another thing I liked. I don’t know where we’re going, but I know whose side I’m on: mine.

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on an MRA, Part Three

Yesterday would have been my first day back at the bookstore. Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager was transferring, so it seemed doable a couple of weeks ago. When the time came, though, it seemed too sad. I knew it would take a lot more transformation for me to feel safe there, and it felt like that would take more work than my 10$ an hour covered. I’ve been wanting to commit to my own business anyway, so I took the leap and declared myself bossless. I’m nervous about the change and still heartachey about what happened, but I’m proud that I put myself first.

Things finally broke down between me and CPAM while the Store Manager was off for a week. We were setting up the textbook department for fall rush, so there was lots of good getting-in-a-flow-and-moving-heavy-books-around—my favorite part of the job.

But on the Friday of that week, something curdled in CPAM. He was in a text message argument with his sister-in-law. (she and his brother had just moved back in with his parents, where he lived as well) He was sniping about her to another employee in the back room and when I walked back there to get more books, he looked at me with such deep contempt, like how dare I walk in there, as if I were the hated sister-in-law herself.

I kept doing my job and chitchatting cheerfully with him—I have that abused-kid bad habit of trying to nice somebody out of being a jerk, as if I can avoid being hurt by being well-behaved enough. It bugged me, though, when he talked about her “bitching,” when he said he was going to “put that bitch in her place.” I had been volleying back his low-key prejudices for weeks, but this outright misogyny was still shocking. I didn’t say anything about it, though, because I was sick of having to say something so many times.

But then he turned on me. Although I had been working with a textbook company on and off for fifteen years, he decided to explain how alphabetizing works. Then he explained it again and again.

“I know how to alphabet,” I joked to try to get him off my case, but I succeeded only in giving him a chance to correct my grammar. Just want to mention at this moment that I have a Master’s Degree in Education.

            I said calmly that I wanted to be treated like an adult, but he kept doubling down on the condescension. I needed to learn how to take constructive criticism, he said, because after all, he was my superior. Which technically he was, but nobody had ever put it quite that way to me before. In all my years of low-level and often-temporary positions, no one had ever talked down to me that way.

As I tried to stand up for myself, he poured on the gaslighting: He said I needed to “compose myself.” He said I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was hearing. I left early, feeling livid and shaken. I wrote to the Store Manager about what happened, and he wrote back right away saying that he would take care of it.

Next Time: He didn’t.

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on a Men’s Rights Activist, Part Two

This story is sad, but it’s hopeful too. I like the way that I was able to love this person, this man so disjointedly separate from me, so deeply. It gives me faith in my heart, even if my taste in humans is once again not the best.

Conversation came back again to the “morbidly obese” who were, Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager kept saying, a problem. “For them,” (us, I meant) “MAYBE, but it’s not fair when society tells people what our bodies should look like. It makes me want to punch society in the face.”

WHY was I IN a conversation about his, about ANY of this, at work? With the Assistant Manager and the Store Manager? The Store Manager cosigned my feminism out of empathy for his teen daughter, which was comforting, but it hurt to have to defend my body weight in the middle of my stupid day job.

Even when I told Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager directly that he was hurting my feelings, he maintained that it was “just a difference of opinion.” He had thoughts on the matter if I was interested. NO, REALLY, SUPERVISOR AT WORK, tell me more about how the size of my ass is burdening you.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a comp class I was in fifteen years ago at Syracuse. The professor had ostensibly chosen food politics as the semester’s theme, but in retrospect I can see she was doing body terrorism before I knew there was such a term. As we watched Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me show shot after shot of headless, poorly dressed fat people, revealing the filmmaker’s contempt for both the fat and the poor, I sat in my slightly two small classroom desk feeling scrutinized. The fat at my middle felt naked, my boobs too big. I felt exposed in a way that reminded me of my long-ago rape.

In 2018, I would have been OUTRAGED, would have called every campus official, but instead I wrote about objectification in my class papers, got an A and moved on. Now, whenever I see Morgan Spurlock’s book, or any other piece of body-shaming trash, in the Little Free Libraries around town, I put them in the recycling where they belong.

Anyway, back to the bookstore, fat-shaming comments weren’t the only ones to come out of CPAM’s mouth—he seemed determined to dismiss any existence of sexism or racism ANYWHERE. “It’s 2018,” he said, “It sucks for everyone.” He brushed off feminism as man-hating, ignored my complaints about his frequent casual racism, and seemed personally injured by any kind of justice talk. I was only DOING any justice talk because his gentle but constant stream of prejudice kept nagging my conscience to say something.

 “Stop trying to school me,” he eventually said, the third time I tried to calmly explain that fat people aren’t less-than, that we haven’t necessarily “let ourselves go,” that we haven’t somehow placed a burden on him or on other straight-sized people just by existing.

I can see how the “schooling” was annoying to him and how it DEFINTELY wasn’t my job. I gave him way too much leeway because I needed a friend, because I wanted a new bookstore home. I should have reported him to the Store Manager, but he had a ways to go, too—I’d had to also gently call HIM out when he referred to an old Cosby joke that was only sort of about rape. (At least SM was receptive to pushback and didn’t make me explain myself, but the reference hadn’t exactly inclined me toward trust. )

Partly, I was doing a bad white person thing: I didn’t want to give up comfort to do what was right. I wanted a break from being like this. I wanted to be a part of things without being an SJW for like FIVE SECONDS but I think what I’m learning is that those days are behind me. Good.

I’m not sure why I tried so hard to belong there, when there’s so much belonging available all around me—there’s marches, there’s canvassing, there’s yoga and massage and occasionally stopping into (super liberal Unitarian) church. There are my feminist-bookstore-owning neighbors who still have their Hillary sign (from primaries!) up. I have a home in the world no matter what. I’m not sure how or why that bookstore got so important to me.

Because of that needless struggle to belong, or because of my poor handling of it, (and, to a greater degree, because America puts children in cages now) the first half of this summer was about battling depression, about really struggling for hope. I want sometimes to go back to my life before activism, before Nazis came back to the streets, before Heather Heyer got murdered, but this is where we are now, and there’s no way out but through.

At the bookstore, that would mean a few more snits and a lot more HR.

Next Time: Does he know what he’s saying?

Did Bernie Ruin the Men of the Left?

            It like so many of my stories lately, it started out in the most rom-commy of ways. I took myself to lunch at a fancy sushi restaurant to celebrate a few different things, and after the twelve- dollar ramen and the four pieces of yellowtail I could afford, I said yes to a really elaborate dessert. Conditioned by years of Food Network to peer back into the kitchen, I watched the dreamy pastry chef execute the multistep process it took to construct the chocolate fever dream what was eventually set on fire before me. I liked how careful he seemed with his hands, so precise that I thought he just might know some knots.

            He stuck in my head so I sent him a card. (Outer envelope, restaurant address. Inner envelope: “To the chef who made my (name of dessert) at lunchtime on 4/3.”) On the back of a homemade card featuring a photo of last year’s azaleas, I gave him my number and suggested that he look me up if he was single or in an open relationship.

            It was a silly thing to do and it made me feel romantic and optimistic and happy, but I assumed I’d just give myself credit for trying and never hear from him—but he texted! And when I sent him my picture he sent back three heart-eye emojis.

            He was a great texter for a few days, all “good morning” and “beautiful” and “sleep well” so I was really excited for our first date. We met downtown and walked around the city at twilight, heading for a bench in our most cinematic park, where the tress were almost in full bloom and the fanciest people were walking their dogs.

            Because I am me and he is a guy that I picked, politics came up almost immediately. Though I’d hope to avoid the primaries conversation to at least give us a CHANCE to like each other, he went ahead and said the spell-breakingest, pants-wall-buildingest thing he could’ve said:

“I’m still upset about my man. I know he could’ve won in November.”

            In my heart was a Star-Wars-prequels cheesy NOOOOOOOOOOOO, and what I said aloud wasn’t much better. I think it would be spelled something like:

“GaaaaaaAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHhhhh, NO!” I practically folded myself in half with anguish and disappointment. I punched him hard on the arm, not a fantastic move a half-hour into a first date, I know. It was a delicious, powerful, bread-baking arm, hard to forget.

            Trump is the very worst, of course, but Bernie has wrecked my love life way more, simply because his slightly subtler “nice guy” misogyny is something I much more likely to encounter in my daily liberal bubble of a life. While my being queer, poly, and fat probably helps ward off any wandering Trumpsters, The Bern is a persistent and pernicious irritation.

            We talked about lots of other things, and in some ways it was a really nice date, culminating with eating cheesecake in a really diner-ish diner, but he kept coming back to Hillary like a chime. What about the banks, he asked, as if Dodd-Frank had arisen from thin air, as if “his man” hadn’t taken money from the gun lobby. The gun lobby!

“That’s understandable, I guess,” said my getting-less-cute-by-the-minute date, pushing my voice up to a level of strident that only Gloria Steinem could hear.

These conversations feel like microagressions, like attempts to put me in my place. Is there anything more condescending than the “I don’t like Hillary, but here are some other women I would vote for” line? Imagine replacing “women” with any other category and it sounds even more tone deaf and creepy.

It’s been a year and I STILL don’t want to hear about how Elizabeth Warren is the kind of woman you could approve of, dude.

To me, Bernie-fervor and the she’s-a-liar disinformation campaign that sparked it was an outgrowth of trolling culture, which itself feels like an expression of rape culture. There might be an anxious-girl leap in there, but that doesn’t actually make it not true. Men who are susceptible to misogynist mob mentality on that scale may never feel safe for me to be around.

It didn’t work out with the pastry chef for a variety of reasons, but I’m happy to come away with hope, with the realization that I have the option to wait, glass-slipper style, for the Hillary-voter of my dreams. That doesn’t mean that I will, but it’s a relief to know that I can.

I know that it wasn’t really a case of Bernie ruining the men of the left. Last year’s primary only served to bring to light the misogyny that permeates all of American society, and it’s a bummer to know that Democrats (OR WHATEVER) aren’t exempt, but we aren’t. Whenever I’m having these annoying conversations with Bernie Bros, sometimes I’m comforted to stop and think “This is the work.” Activism doesn’t only live in pussy hats and marches, it’s in the little day-to-day pushbacks that can slowly move the conversation where we want to it be. I’d rather have snuggles, but for now, I’ll settle for evolution, even in the tiniest of ways.

Fuck This Sexist Piece of Kindhearted Advice

            Not the first part, that’s like my whole thing. The “let love find you” part.

Last week, I left the library where I worked with Mr. Makeout Music. There were a lot of good reasons for doing so (Work crushes can sometimes be a sign that I need to be doing something more absorbing.) but the main reason was that it was exhausting to keep pretending to be okay around him. I wasn’t. Now that I’ve got the time and space and naps to heal, the pain of him is almost gone.

            Because I couldn’t bring myself to walk past MM one more time, Sweetie went to clean out my desk for me, with Awesome Genderqueer Librarian’s help. In the bag with my collection of kid art and my desk socks was a lovely stack of “We miss you!” cards from kids and coworkers. It was very gratifying to still be valued there, after three sometimes-crying months of love-shame and election grief. The woman who wrote the above advice is one of my favorite humans in the universe, but it unleashed a stream of gleeful annoyance that I’m kind of excited to paragraph.

            It’s partly that she knew (Ugh, everybody knew.) that my leaving was even about heartbreak at all, but mostly it’s this—I’m mad at myself for spending three months crying about a guy who got scared of me because I made the first move. He has tried to frame it in other ways, but from where I’m sitting, he adored me until I took his hand.

            Of course he had the right to decline my advances for any reason, but I hated the way I felt around him after that—too big, too excited, too complicated, too much. About our weird somewhere-between-friendship-and-the other-thing situation, he kept saying “just let things develop organically” every time I had a question or needed a clarification, but I think what he meant was, let things develop on his terms.

            Even the way our flirtation started, with him visiting my department or my office when he could (He had keys to my office, but I certainly didn’t have keys to his.), with me waiting around with an open heart and what I hoped was a pretty face for him to come and be praised, it sometimes made me feel helpless and trapped, even when things were nice. In one of our fights, I said I wasn’t a web cam girl, just waiting around to approve of him. (He probably wished he hadn’t told me his porn preferences…) The way the building is designed, he could see me from almost any of his posts, and it felt really claustrophobic sometimes.

            The “let love come to you” (if you’re a woman) paradigm is part of what makes the traditional structures of dating unworkable to me. When I like someone, I really like him/her/them. When I want ANYTHING, I try very hard to be awesome at getting it. If I’m attracted to somebody, I tell them. I ask for what I want and see if it works for them. I’m not Sleeping fucking Beauty, I’m an adventuress on a quest. On a good day,  I’m a goddess, and men have been known to kneel down for me without my even having to command it. I have a dominant, honest, brave, ridiculous heart that knows what it wants and will always go after it.

            The passiveness of the “wait for love to find you” paradigm takes me to a dark place. It reminds me of necrophila. It reminds me of rohypnol. (When I just Googled that for spelling, the horrifying third choice was “rohypnols buy.”) It reminds me of back when there was MySpace and all of my guy friends liked girls whose profile pictures managed these slack, vacant expressions. I could never have made my face look uninhabited enough to resemble the ghost/zombie girls who were the style of the Mid-Zeroes. It reminds me of the time I was told that I smile a lot for a submissive.

           

            The boxed-in passiveness of the advice reminds me of Moana being told that everything she needed was on this one little island and that all she had to do to be happy was reject the song of her own soul. (Did anyone else see her and her many new islands as a polyamory tale? Maybe it was just me.) Like Moana, I am an explorer, a leader, a navigator. I won’t sit in a box and wait to be clicked on, and I hope to never tunnel-vision myself into any more narrow little islands of gendered constraint.

Like many of my rants, this is really a culmination of an argument with myself. Since my brokeny teenage years, I’ve always “known” in my heart that I’m not passive enough to be loved by a man, that I could never be compliant or compromising enough for a straight cis male. That idea is offensive to one and all, but it didn’t come from nowhere. I would love for it to go away.

When I look at it objectively, I see that Mr. Makeout Music was a rare exception. I am surrounded, past and present, by men who have enjoyed being sought out, pursued, and pounced upon. Far from being a turnoff, my literal and figurative bigness and enthusiasm have drawn the best, most adventurous, most oomph-filled men to me. Some of them have even stuck around.

Though I’ll always appreciate the way that he woke up my body and heart, I think Mr. Makeout Music mostly served to show me what I don’t want—I never want to try and make myself smaller or less in hopes that someone with a narrower scope might see me. I never want to be stuck on an island again.

            I know that romantic love isn’t something that can be to-do-listed into existence, but I WILL have agency. I will not sit in a box and wait. I will not listen to the fears and the family/social pressures that kept me away from the water. I aim to untie myself from the hetero/mononormative shore and learn to sail. My heart knows the way.

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part Three

After I found out that the thing was mutual, I felt nervous about going into work. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, whether I was supposed to hug him hello and goodbye, etc. His desk was in a very male-occupied space and it always felt very vulnerable to visit him there.  Election Day, on the possible cusp of our first female president and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, I was also fretting about whether I’d been too affectionate in my voting-morning text. I’m not superproud that my Call Me Maybeness helped get me through the day, but there was also poetry and canvassing and a general sense of patriotic/neighborhood love that made such a fraught day as bearable as possible.

Then, of course, the worst happened. After a year of hope and struggle and fighting misogynist trolls and as much canvassing and phone banking as I could handle, after a year of telling the library kids it would be okay, of telling Bernie Bros to fuck off, of boycotting conservative relatives, the worst happened and Trump won. Wednesday morning, at the college bookstore where we work together, Sweetie and I listened to Hillary’s beautiful concession speech and cried even as we tried to take courage. On my commute, I alternated between singing along with my upbeat playlist and sobbing. If I never hear Fight Song again, it’ll be too soon.

My plan when I got to my afternoon job at the library was to be strong and soothing for the kids, to help them feel as hopeful as possible, but when I got to the children’s department, my friend the Nice Genderqueer Librarian saw me and burst into tears so we held each other and I sobbed loudly and brokenheartedly in front of the kids and everyone. There was nothing else to be done at that moment.

One of the other security guards was down in our department showing concern and accepting a hug, so I was brave/needy enough to snivel “Can you get (Mr. Makeout Music) for me?” She smiled and radioed for him. He totally Muppeted out when he saw me, just reached his arms out as far as they could go and gave me the warmest, friendliest, most joyful hug imaginable. I got the chance to tell him “I’m sorry white people suck so bad!” which is a sentiment I’ll be expressing as often as possible for the foreseeable future. (Seriously, if you’re a white person reading this, get it the fuck together and stand up for people of color. And while I’m at it, if you’re a man reading this, get it the fuck together and stand up for women. It’s past time to inventory your privilege and start using it to help. We’re past life and death here.)

Oh pals, Mr. Makeout Music took such good care of me that day. He talked me through the good and evil factors at play in the election and helped me to articulate my silver lining, which was that good people were drawing together in anger and love. He also asked if he could come visit me at the bookstore that Friday, since the library was closed for Veteran’s Day. I was delighted at the prospect of him distracting me at both my jobs, so we made plans for a picnic on the Hogwarts-esque campus where I work. No one would begrudge me a long lunch on such a week.

That sad Wednesday was made much less sad by the fact that he spent almost my whole shift by my side. He brought his notebook down and worked on a paper so soothingly next to me, it was just such a comfortable family feeling. He joked with the kids and parents and watched me stave off apoplexy when a mean-girling parent tried to challenge my taste in music.  When he switched tables to play chess with my teen assistants, I drew flowers, stars, and tiny red hearts all over his homework while I had a Shine Bright Like a Diamond singalong with one of the little girls. I was totally singing to Mr. Makeout Music. When he turned around from chess to see how the homework-art was progressing, his eyes flashed something so beautiful and perfect and clear. I felt bathed in a glittery cloud of safety and strength, like I recognized someone so special and devoted and true. And, I hopehopehoped, mine.

An Extremely Personal Reason Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton

As I’ve written here before, my conception was an accident, while my parents were still in college. Her family’s Catholic faith mean that she had no option of abortion. She was coerced by her family into marriage at the age of twenty. Throughout my childhood, in the worst of times, she told me that her marriage, which included both verbal and physical abuse and marital rape, was my fault. Because I was a child when I heard that accusation, I had little choice but to believe it, and even after decades of hard inner work, a tiny fragment of my heart believes it still.

Though it’s the central pain of my existence, that dual sense of unwelcome and responsibility is also a huge gift. It fuels my drive to make the space around me safe for those who have less power and to push back against coercion and sexist norms whenever I can. My background compels me to do whatever little bit I can so that someday women won’t be forced by religion, family pressure, or tradition to give up control of their own bodies.

For large swaths of my life, I’ve simply hated my mother, almost thought of her as a monster. (My dad, of course, deserves as many paragraphs, and he’s had them.) She and I have spent four painful decades trying to make friends with each other, and to both of our credit, we now enjoy an uneasy peace. But I never truly empathized with twenty-year-old her until the pope’s visit to the U.S. unlocked a treasure trove of anti-Catholic fury in my heart.

It wasn’t right for my mom to take her anger out on me, but she was absolutely right and justified in being angry. In that forced decision, her autonomy was taken away, and only now, as I’m learning to relish my own autonomy, can I begin to fathom that loss. She lived, we all lived, in a tyranny in which chaos and violence could rain down at any moment if, for example, she hadn’t washed, matched, and put away the correct pair of brown socks. What’s more, she thought that she deserved the abuse, because Catholicism and sexism had taught her that she was less than he was, period.

Even long-divorced, she told me that she should have just shut up and obeyed him better, that that would have kept us safe.

But what about existing, you ask? I really love existing, and I wouldn’t trade my family for another in a million years. But what if, in that momentous moment, she’d felt empowered to choose? I think she might have still had me, but if I hadn’t been the product of coercion, she and I may at least have had less of a struggle to make a relationship. I do hold both of us accountable for our own actions, but what would it have been like to grow up in a world where my mother’s body was her own?

I’m sure that some little-kid part of me thinks that by advocating for choice, I can go back in time and repair that essential wound, but I can’t. What I can do is hope to give other mothers a better chance at deciding their own lives, and give more children the chance to be genuinely loved and wanted.

Electing Hillary Clinton send a clear message against misogyny and oppressive gender norms, and she is also the Democrat who is most vocal in her support of Planned Parenthood and women’s (AKA everyone’s) health. I am voting my mom’s life, for my own, and for children of all genders, that they may be wanted, loved, chosen, and safe.