I woke up yesterday morning, made breakfast for me and the kids and turned on Mickey Mouse in the kitchen. I took my coffee and toast into the living room and turned on the news. Christine Blasey Ford was giving her opening statement. I didn’t know it was going to be on live TV. Her words hit me like a sledge hammer in the gut. Almost eighteen hours later I am still raw. I’m trying not to cry. I can’t describe exactly how I’m feeling. I’m just flooded with memories and emotions about what happened to me at 15 and how I never told anyone. I can feel that shaken feeling you get after an attack. The soreness on your arms, I imagined what the bruises looked like, as I sat in the bath yesterday. I remember crying softly so my mom couldn’t hear me. I had the door locked. My mom was right outside, I could have told her what happened to me, the trauma I just endured. I never did. Yesterday Christine Blassey Ford gave me permission to acknowledge that what happened to me was wrong and not my fault. And I feel pain in that. What happened to me, when I was fifteen altered me. When I talk to parents now about their teenagers, I always preface that, I was a bad teenage, I was always in trouble, I did bad things. In our Being Human Residency, we had already been talking about the stages of development in our kids and ourselves as kids. My stinky, bloody, dark, teenage box had already been pried open. My years of sexual trauma is intertwined with myself as a child. Being taken advantage of. I want to run from it. I get scared, I might get in trouble for being depressed about this stuff. For being triggered like this. One night, when I was sixteen, my mom told another mom, “It wasn’t your daughters’ fault, my daughter’s the ring leader here, she’s a bad seed”. I think my mom may have even been grabbing my hair and shoving me in the car. I have been taught it’s my fault I was sexually assaulted. I thought it wasn’t important because it happened when I was a kid. That anything in High School didn’t count. Never talk about it. I don’t really know what steps to take to work my way out of this, I don’t know how much I should try to bury it again, pretend it didn’t happen, or write about it, or talk about it, or cry about it. I still feel ashamed by it. I feel uncomfortable.
Category: Feminism
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FEMINISM
On the way to Target the other day I was listening to the news, the recent news of Trump and the woman he “Octopus armed” on the airplane. It reminded me of my Greyhound Bus trip to Wyoming when I was seventeen years old. A guy sat next to me, (which always happened on the Greyhound). We talked during the day, he’s from Detroit, he tells me about the Car manufacturing business, how it’s all getting shut down. I listen in earnest, something I’ve always done. I like listening to what people have to say, hearing their stories. Sometimes men misunderstood this and thought I like them in a sexual way. I got tired of listening at some point, the conversation got boring. As the day turned into night I pretended I was asleep. The guy put a blanket over both of us, slid his hand under the blanket and up my t-shirt and started feeling my boobs. At first, I continued to pretend I was sleeping, I figured he would lay off. I figured I could just let him get a feel and he’d leave me alone. He didn’t let up, he got more into it, he tried to kiss me, he had bad breath. That’s when I finally said “leave me alone”. He was mad, I couldn’t wait till he got off the bus. As a kid growing up I had several encounters like this, which would be classified more as molestation I guess, since they were grown men and I was a child. One time I was in the back of my dad’s pick-up truck, my dad’s friend was laying next to me. We were laying down with a blanket over us because it was illegal for us to be riding in the back like that. The man reached his hand under my shirt and started feeling my under-developed ten-year-old boobs. I never told anyone. Another time when I was twelve my mom left me with one of her friends while she went to her class at Grossmont College. He was teaching me racquetball. He stood behind me, spread my legs and stuck his hand up my little green terry cloth shorts my mom brought me back from Acapulco. I was paralyzed. Thank god, my mom came back soon. I went to the bathroom and found a Band-Aid stuck to my butt, it fell off his finger when he was molesting me. I never told anyone.
My mom was a strong woman. She was a feminist. She didn’t raise me in princess outfits or to think I needed a man or that men had any power over me. But I lived like men were above me, like they had power over me. Like the things they did were just natural, a natural human drive. I never thought they crossed a boundary. I thought it was my fault. I erased these incidents out of my mind.
This week I am seeing things in a different light. I am seeing that sexism is so engrained in our society. I wonder how we are raising our girls, the media, the toys they make for girls. The focus on being pretty for little girls, being sexy for women. It’s everywhere, it makes women powerless, even when our mothers are feminists. We need to change our collective consciousness as women, as mothers. As I turned 45 this year I felt a deep change come over me. I don’t know if it is because of all the shit I’ve been through, the soul searching and craziness I went through with infertility. I don’t know if it’s the experience of being a mother, but I finally don’t give a shit what people think of me. More specifically I don’t feel like I need to wear lipstick all the time or a bra. I don’t care if people think I’m old or ugly or un-feminine. I only wish I could have had this confidence when I was a young girl, when I was a woman in her twenties. I can only hope now to instill this self-confidence and self-esteem in Fiona and to raise Jack to be a feminist.
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Why would a woman tell another woman she shouldn’t have kids because it will ruin her life, ruin her art career, ruin her body, take away all her freedoms? It happened to me, good friends told me I shouldn’t have kids because it would ruin my art career. On Facebook this weekend a thread was started with a question, kids? Or no kids? Versus Art? I can’t remember the exact phrasing. It brought a slew of responses, most of them kid positive, all of them acknowledging women’s “place” in the art world, being less than satisfactory. Men still have the lion share of Museum and Gallery representation and sell their art at a much higher price. But would this have been different if men were the ones giving birth? I wonder. Many women on the thread also made comments about privileged women with children vs. non-privileged women with children, those who married well vs. those who didn’t fair too well on the significant other and single moms. Categorizing women artists with children in a hierarchy according to wealth and circumstance to determine who has the best chance of “Making it” as an artist, which means competing in a male dominated art world. But is that it? So simply defined? Having the ability, time, money, right circumstances to be an artist is only half of it. A person must have confidence, determination, a vision, and work ethic.
Is confidence more the defining factor? Have our women counterparts told us negative things about ourselves, pitted us against each other, making us less confident? Has that stifled our determination to be professional artists and compete in a man’s world? Has our vision been clouded because of all the comments from other women? A man has NEVER told me if I have kids I can’t be a successful artist, it’s only been women. Has our work ethic when it comes to our own work been side stepped to make more time for cooking and cleaning and wiping butts? We are our own worst enemies. Until ALL women come together and support each other in the art world regardless if we have kids or not, money or not, husbands or not, we will NEVER be able to make headway.
Yesterday I went for a hike with my family. I brought my sketchbook and pens, I brought the same for my almost four-year-old daughter, my son likes climbing on trees, so I didn’t bring one for him. Fiona and I sketched shadows and leaves and cat tails. I jotted down notes on things I want to write about, things I want to paint about. We hiked the whole way around the lake on foot, the first time with no stroller, no back-pack carriers. It was a beautiful fall day, crisp, trees all turning oranges and reds and yellows. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, a family or no family. No one ever told a man not to have a family because it will ruin his life or career. Why are women told they can’t enjoy having a family life? I have a sink FULL of dirty dishes looking at me, the house is a mess, laundry piled up. I have two kids I need to get ready for pre-school, make lunches. I don’t care, things will get done. If I need to write or go to my studio while they are in school and do the dishes later that’s fine. No one, no circumstance can take away a woman’s need to be creative. It’s unfortunate that other women would try to dampen our dreams and desires of being artists because we chose to have children. Remember, Men do not do this to each other. Are we keeping ourselves down by not uniting?
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 