*from Meadowlands, 1996, by Louise Gluck. I have posted this here before but I love it so much that every single time I come across it (it’s saved on my computer – ‘What’s this again? Oh.’) I fall in love with it all over again. My parents had many flaws, and my mother was in many, many ways a horror show; she disliked me from the moment I was surgically removed from her abdomen (actually, before that), but gosh they loved one another, and gosh my dad was funny. They were funny together, when I wasn’t put, shoved reluctantly, in the middle, the problem, the other woman. Heartbreaking. Insane. And very, very funnybecause heartbreakingly insane. Funny because love and madness and family are a mystical, magical brew, if you get out alive.
A psychic in San Francisco once told me that I would not have survived had it not been for my sense of humor. Y’think?
She was 17 going on 50 when we spoke that day; I was 41 or 42. Her mom was a handful of years younger than I was, working full-time in the school – as a 3rd grade teacher – where I was subbing the day I encountered her daughter. She was in my niece’s class (maybe?) in a small rural school that was also my Alma Mater. I had seen her around, knew who her mother was, but remember that morning well, because she was in the office, not in class, when we fell into conversation.
Her energy was intense, volatile, disruptive, fitting for a tall red-head who was chronically late to school despite her mother being an employee. She told me that if she had one more absence, she would be expelled, unable to graduate the following spring. This seemed to amuse her. It was clear to me that she was hot for attention of any kind, and negative attention would do, or so it appeared.
A teacher’s child not making it to school that often? Unthinkable. How was this possible? I spoke briefly to her mother, who said the equivalent of ‘Good luck with that, getting that one out of bed and into class’. It was clear to me that she’d given up. It was clear the child and mother were at loggerheads. It was also clear that her mother, while popular as a teacher, was a party girl. I hadn’t been back in my home town long before those details were apparent even to a casual – pre-fakebook – onlooker.
I don’t know if there was a biological father in the picture, although at one point the mother had a longtime boyfriend, or 2, or 4. There may have been sexual abuse issues; men prey on women, single moms whose young, vulnerable daughters and sons are their preferred cut of human meat. But again, I don’t know. I do know, I did find out, that her mother was infamous for having relationships with male former students, students no longer 8 or 9 years old, but rather 20, or 21. This made me feel sick.
Should I have intervened? I didn’t. I didn’t know either of them, and it seemed set in stone, concrete, already, including in the community as a whole. Plus, who the fck was I to interfere? I’d been back in my hometown for 5 minutes and was outraged while not wholly informed about a teacher neglecting her own child’s education and upbringing. Maybe that’s what it was? Maybe I was still adjusting? Maybe it was too complicated, as was my life at the time? Maybe?
But even if the kid was difficult and willful, surely there was a way, a method, an inducement, a carrot to dangle? Surely a family member, the principal, a close friend – someone, anyone – could help, intervene, holding both of these humans compassionately accountable? I didn’t know them or enough to ask, ‘Have you sought help?’ Too much water under the bridge by then, I suppose. Too late.
I am haunted by that moment, because this was not a stupid child. And she was a child, despite being 17 going on 50. I am haunted by her, by her untapped, unrecognized potential in that moment and since. I am, or rather was, also unsurprised by her dying in her 30s, around the same age her mother was when I first met her. And who knows what traumas her mom had been through, including, now this, the death of her daughter.
She left 2 kids behind. An overdose. Her partner dead less than a year prior. Just numbers. Both kids under 10 years old. What a waste. What a sad, terrible loss upon loss. I am sorry I didn’t know her better. I’m sorry I was able and chose to do nothing other, nothing more than hear her out that morning. However short her life, still, she haunts me.
*a poem from Adrienne Rich, and the last stanza – which I have italicized – seems particularly appropriate to the times in which we are living. More on Rich, who died in 2012, here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich
Despair falls: the shadow of a building they are raising in the direct path of your slender ray of sunlight Slowly the steel girders grow the skeletal framework rises yet the western light still filters through it all still glances off the plastic sheeting they wrap around it for dead of winter
At the end of winter something changes a faint subtraction from consolations you expected an innocent brilliance that does not come though the flower shops set out once again on the pavement their pots of tight-budded sprays the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold and at such a price though someone must buy them you study those hues as if with hunger
Despair falls like the day you come home from work, a summer evening transparent with rose-blue light and see they are filling in the framework the girders are rising beyond your window that seriously you live in a different place though you have never moved
and will not move, not yet but will give away your potted plants to a friend on the other side of town along with the cut crystal flashing in the window-frame will forget the evenings of watching the street, the sky the planes in the feathered afterglow: will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold
where still you can manage to go on paying rent where still you can believe it’s the old neighborhood: even the woman who sleeps at night in the barred doorway — wasn’t she always there? and the man glancing, darting for food in the supermarket trash – when did his hunger come to this? what made the difference? what will make it for you? What will make it for you? You don’t want to know the stages and those who go through them don’t want to tell You have four locks on the door your savings, your respectable past your strangely querulous body, suffering sicknesses of the city no one can name You have your pride, your bitterness your memories of sunset you think you can make it straight through if you don’t speak of despair.
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope? – You yourself must change it. – what would it feel like to know your country was changing? – You yourself must change it. – Though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange what would it means to stand on the first page of the end of despair?
These photos were taken during the last summer days, cold mornings followed by hot mid-afternoons that started ending too soon, again, already! Personally, I love wasps – they pollinate, and mostly eat the teeny tiny bugs that abound, the kind you and I can’t see, and they make these (to me) gorgeous hives, nests, paper spirals that I love discovering tho, yes, less so when hanging off my house.
I am reading Word Slut, by Amanda Montel; it’s been on the ‘to be read pile’ for an age. I even borrowed and read her more recent book while this one ‘waited’ – The Age of Magical Overthinking. I’m loving it so far. It’s all about the etymology of words, which is why I dug out these pics because Waspish, like Spinster and other words primarily used to describe women, didn’t start out that way and that – the patriarchy impacting language – fascinates me.
A spinster was, originally, anyone who spun wool, which men did as well as women, but over time it indicated a woman who was able to make money on her own, and we know how the guys feel about that thus the negative connotation of a crotchety woman living in unhappy, unfulfilled solitude. How do we know this change in perception happened?, Because they – the dominant gender – didn’t make spinster into a lonely, basement or shack dwelling single man, thereby revealing their feelings: Spinster, not a male or female skilled laborer, but rather an unmarried (or marry-able) woman of dubious charm or potential. A crone.
Waspish. How many times (none, for me) have you heard a man called waspish? It’s generally applied to ‘wasp tongued’ women, and perhaps occasionally to gay men, but to straight men, never?! Amirite? Regardless, wasps are groovy insects, a help in controlling the insect population, and yes, my tongue is as sharp as a wasp’s sting. So?
*The nonsensical b.s. about Tylenol being unsafe or a cause of autism (N.B.: geriatric sperm is one of many in a constellation of contributing causes), even the Jimmy Kimmel suspension a month ago, while important (1st Amendment Rights matter!), are all a distraction from the real, actual harms – including death – of women in this country due to ‘domestic’ violence, a deep, long-standing misunderstanding of same, as well as misogynistic policies and laws putting pregnant women at risk. And not just pregnant women as the State of Mississippi declared a pubic health emergency this past August due to a severe uptick in infant mortality rates. Well, when you cut pre-natal and post-natal care funding, when you force PP out of your state, when you lose ob/gyns due to anti-choice, forced birth, anti-pregnant people laws that make practicing medicine the right way impossible, women and infants are going to die. It’s that simple.
In domestic violence situations, the most dangerous time for women is when they are pregnant or have just given birth. The following below is from 2022, but things haven’t improved since – in fact I bet they’re getting worse given who sits in the Oval. This short article comes to us via the Harvard T.H. Chan school of Public Health. Something else to pay attention to right now? HHS Secretary Brain Worm is turning his focus to birth control, and abortion care. A sex addict who has a history of spousal abuse and gaslighting looking into women’s healthcare? What could go wrong?
Everything.
And one other thing re: autism. I remember well Jenny McCarthy and her crusade against vaccines, a crusade that continues to this day. Taking medical advice from a former porn star is about as smart as taking medical advice from BRAIN WORMY SEX-ADDICTS. But why?Becausea much more likely cause of Ms. McCarthy’s child’s autism is her drug use during her porn career. Huh? The amount of drugs used by actors within the porn industry is off the charts. How do I know this? Because I worked with actors whose side hustle when not doing legit theatre/TV was doing porn. Did one of them work with Jenny from Chicago. Not sure, we’re out of touch and even if we weren’t, I wouldn’t ask. But, can we admit that maybe, just maybe that causality makes a helluva lot more sense than blaming vaccines given safely to literally billions of children worldwide? Ok. I got that out. Phew. The Chan School article:
Women in the U.S. who are pregnant or who have recently given birth are more likely to be murdered than to die from obstetric causes—and these homicides are linked to a deadly mix of intimate partner violence and firearms.
Homicide deaths among pregnant women are more prevalent than deaths from hypertensive disorders, hemorrhage, or sepsis, wrote Rebecca Lawn, postdoctoral research fellow, and Karestan Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiology.
The U.S. has a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence than comparable countries, such violence is often fatal, and it frequently involves guns, Lawn and Koenen noted. They cited one study that found that, from 2009–2019, 68% of pregnancy-related homicides involved firearms. That study also found that Black women face substantially higher risk of being killed than white or Hispanic women.
Laws restricting women’s access to reproductive care and abortion can place women at further risk, since control over a woman’s reproductive choices often plays a role in intimate partner violence. Lenient firearms legislation also increase the risk.
Koenen and Lawn called gun violence a health emergency for pregnant women. But they added that pregnancy-related homicides are preventable*. When pregnant women have checkups, healthcare providers can identify those at risk of violence and try to help them.
*Yes, they are. We could demand stronger gun laws, and men could stop killing women.In fact, should men be allowed to own guns at all, given their violent tendencies and inability to control themselves? Food for thought.
