I watch as Fiona takes Pink Bear to the diaper changing table; she first puts down a soft cloth, she wipes his bottom, telling me he has a poop, she’s as gentle as can be. She attempts to put on a diaper, but needs my help. I help her with the diaper, then go back to the kitchen where I am making dinner. Jack keeps asking about watching Mickey Mouse. I say “No”, he falls down crying. We repeat this scenario several times a day. He always forgets about T.V. after five minutes, or candy, his other true passion that he loves to whine about. Jack and Fiona are only two and a half, I forget that, I feel like they are so much older and wiser. Like somehow they can understand my total devastation and depression; fall out from my New American Administration. An administration I attest. Yesterday I said “Goodbye Cruel World” to my on-line communities, Facebook and Nextdoor. I sit here this morning missing my people, but yesterday I made the decision to get Off-Line and take to the streets. I made the decision to reach out, person to person, find ways to be involved in my community, meet new people in real life, make new friends in my neighborhood. On Friday night I felt like I was having a breakdown. A psychiatric breakdown, “911 what’s your emergency?” I reply, “Trump was elected president”. I needed a stronger drug, a tranquilizer. (that didn’t really happen, but I imagined it happening). Yesterday I took my babies to the park, met up with a friend. Jack and Fiona went off and explored every inch of the playground. I sat and talked with my good friend. They were all the sudden like little kids, not babies. On the drive home, I heard the announcement about Steve Bannon becoming Trumps chief strategist. After Jack and Fiona went down for their nap I researched Bannon. I started to feel physically sick, like I was going to throw up. That’s the moment I deleted my nextdoor and Facebook accounts. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to handle the furry of conversation and outrage online, I knew I didn’t want to focus my energy on posting and sharing articles on Facebook, I KNEW NOW WAS THE TIME TO HIT THE STREETS! I went to my stationary bike and worked out, sweat, then filled a hot bath, I lay down in the tub, under bubbles of lavender and sobbed, just as I did on Friday listening to Leonard Cohen. I sobbed with pictures in my mind of Jack and Fiona playing at the park, knowing that all the optimism and idea that racism and sexism was on it’s way out in their bright new world was dead. I sobbed with my mouth wide open, spit coming out, thinking of all the non-white people in American feeling scared as shit right now. I sobbed about the car posted on Facebook that had “Fagot” spray painted on it. I sobbed about the KKK not being stopped YET, that they are allowed to have a rally. I sobbed about how easy it is for white people to just “accept Trump, give him a chance”. I deleted my Facebook account and miss all my friends from around the world fighting the fights of justice. I will miss keeping in touch with them and everyone. But I am here. I am hitting the streets, there is too much to lose, too much at stake not to get involved, to stay on Facebook griping and moaning and sharing articles. I want to be a physical part of the movement. Me and my babies. I don’t know how I will do it, how I will get the information I need to be part of it, but they did it in the sixties, I’m sure I can figure it out today.
Category: Feminism
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Heavy Shit. I let my boobs bounce free today and wore my Hilary Button on my shirt. I cried talking about the election and had a strange encounter with a Trump supporting kid at the park. I’ve been blasting nineties hip-hop in the car driving the babies around, Jacks learning to chair dance. I feel mad, sad, and ready to fight for Democracy in America. I will NEVER accept Donald Trump as my president. I DON’T care what that stance costs me. I will NOT let this fly. I do not see the silver lining in it, except for my eye balls being ripped open, my callused white, liberal, life that left me thinking that “things can’t be that bad” during the “Black Lives Matter” movement, to knowing now, that things are that bad. My eyes have been ripped open to the systemized racism in America, the pitfalls of our national education system that’s left people ignorant and mislead. My heart bleeds for the pain and suffering for our world, in this country and all other countries. How can we come together? How can we be that final movement to end this constant oppression and theft of our innocence and inherent kindness? The past two days I’ve hugged and kissed my babies harder than ever before. I see their pure love towards everyone and everything. They want to help people, to be nurturing, to be kind. Children do this naturally. Children are taught hate and prejudice. They are taught to only care about themselves, to be selfish. So many of us wonder, “How can people not care about the Syrian refugees?”. They don’t even want to help when they can. They give all the reasons why not, instead of thinking about just helping people. Where I live in San Rafael, we have a good homeless support system, a St Vincent’s, A Ritter House, residents of San Rafael are constantly trying to make services for the homeless move somewhere else. They complain about too many homeless people, instead of having some compassion and thanking God that they aren’t homeless themselves. Drop off a Turkey people! Sorry, that was a rant. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now. I can’t help but blame myself for not staying involved in politics for the past fifteen years. After seeing the live bombing of Iraq broadcast on TV after 9/11 I’ve been dismayed. Since being in Marin, working at Nordstroms, where I was told I wasn’t aloud to talk to people about the war and how we needed to end it. I was told once during an art class I was taking that a person was very offended that I talked about animal rights and asked her to donate to PETA. The government shut down made me so mad. I was harassed with my Obama sticker on my car in Marin. My car was keyed and my Jerry Brown sticker ripped off in Marin. It’s scary and I’m a white suburban housewife. Things are not good in this country right now. Forget about being a teacher, I need to be an activist. We can never become complacent.
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“Jack, are you O.K.? What did you put in your mouth?” I ask. We’re in Target, drool is trickling down the side of Jacks mouth, his eyes are starting to water. I think he’s choking; until his mouth opens wider and a grey liquid comes spilling out. I recognize chunks of bell pepper, mushrooms, and a greenish color, from the pizza and pesto pasta the night before. He throws up again, this time revealing lunch, pieces of seaweed land on the plastic dump truck, getting stuck inside the cardboard box edges, (We’ll have to buy this one I think) The liquid covers the red plastic cart, splatters on the floor. Fiona looks at Jack in shock. A woman looks at me in shock, as if I could have prevented this from happening. “Oh my god” I say. One lady with a baby offers to give me her baby wipes. “No thank you, I think I’m going to need more than baby wipes” I say. She says “O.K., I’ll stay clear” not wanting to infect her baby. I stand there for a minute, I ask someone in the cell phone sales area, “Do you work here?” They don’t really, but they call for help and get me a plastic bag I ask for to put the throw up clothes in. People pass with a wide berth looking at my situation. One lady says, “I’ve been there”. I stand with a smile on my face just waiting until I can move Jack and Fiona and start cleaning up. I don’t want to dislodge any throw up from where it sits right now. I don’t want throw up on me! A Target employee finally arrives with a large plastic bag, a bunch of paper towels, a spray bottle of blue cleaning solution. I get to work. When the woman first came out she had this look on her face like, “Oh this job really sucks!” But after she realized I was going to handle this, I wasn’t going to make her help me clean it, she softened her stance. I went into taking care of business mode, stripped the clothes off the babies, wiped, scooped, spayed, getting every last bit of throw up off the cart and the floor. “You might need to spray down the straps though” I say. “The throw up gets stuck in them and the stink never goes away” This happened to our high chairs, that smell never did go away even though I washed them many times. I put the babies back in the cart. “Jack are you going to throw up again?” I ask. He says he is O.K., so I decide to take my chances and finish shopping. I feel crazy doing this, but I’m already here and my carts half way full already. This morning I can still feel the moment, the “Oh shit, we all just shared the same water bottle”, wondering if Fiona and I are next.
On the way to Target I was listening to the news, the recent news of Trump and the woman he “Octopus armed” on the airplane. It reminded me of a similar situation I was in, but mine took place on a Greyhound Bus. I was on my way to Wyoming, I had the window seat. A guy sits next to me, (which always happened on the Greyhound). We talk 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 have misunderstood this quality and take it as me “Being interested”. I got tired of listening to this particular person though, he became 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 really bad breath. That’s when I finally said “leave me alone”. He was mad, I couldn’t wait till he got off the bus. I was eighteen when this happened. As a kid growing up I had several encounters similar to 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, his friend was with 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 my mom left me with one of her friends while she went to her class at Grossmont College. He was teaching me racquetball. I was twelve years old. 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. The stories go on and on for me, men feeling me up, grabbing me, pressuring me to have sex, one of my professors getting me to come over to his house to “help me with my paintings” then asking me to kiss him. He was old and this might be his last chance he told me. He asked if I would sleep with him. I was so disappointed. I looked up to him. Then I found out how many other women students he tried that with. I never told on him though.
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 until I got married I still 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”. If anything it was my fault or I just erased these incidents out of my mind. I didn’t want to think of them. I went along with things I didn’t want to go along with. I wondered why. I wondered why I didn’t have more self-esteem, why I let myself get used.
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.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 