Thoughts the Monday After
This is very much a topic I don’t want to write about (and I’m sure most people don’t want to read about — it’s upsetting). I don’t want to read about. I don’t want to think about, because when I do, I feel utterly powerless in a way that makes me feel I am not even really here.
The morning I learned Roe v. Wade had been overturned, I was sitting in my home office, working. I took a break to scroll on my phone and there was the news. It’s happened. I had dreamed that night that I was pregnant with a third child, something my husband and I have made sure can’t happen. That morning, I started my period; it had been a dream. There was no third child. The blood was relief and shame.
Why did I dream I was pregnant the night before Roe v. Wade was overturned? I never wanted a third child. Was it some primordial scream from my body, nearing the end of its reproductive years?
I walked around all weekend in a fog. This terrible thing had happened, clinics across the nation were no longer providing abortions. Smug people in California were saying come to our state, we got this! I used to live there, California. But now I live here, more up close and personal where anti-choicers meet guns in seemingly larger numbers. I can’t go around upset all the time, so I have shut down. I would feel differently if I still lived in California, I’m quite sure. I’d be upset, but I’d be riding high on the crest of social change instead of the mired in the brackish backwaters of people who suffer moral certainty, people who love the Constitution so much they want to shove that outdated document down everyone’s throats, except the part where it talks about separation of church and state.
This weekend was my son’s birthday party. I felt sick but put on a happy face. I am so lucky that both children came exactly when they were wanted. I am lucky to be able to, along with my husband, provide and care for my children. Nevertheless, I know what it is to be a woman in this world, feeling like a second-class citizen despite what everyone says.
Witnessing on social media the outpouring of emotion, none of it is wrong and I don’t mean to criticize. I’m just noticing. Some people have swung into action, organizing, because that’s what they do. Some people are all about the I told you so’s, I told you this would happen, so that is what they do. Some people are putting on a we-can-do-it, Rose the Riveter face, despite how they might be feeling, because that is what they do. In a noticeable lack of actual action, I am writing thoughts down because that is what I do.
The Supreme Court’s decision is illegitimate. When we lose faith in our institutions, chaos follows. But that is where we are. I will not live in a country where my bodily autonomy is illegal. And so I don’t live there. I live somewhere else in my head and go about cleaning up after my son’s birthday party. He, like my husband, doesn’t understand being a woman in the world. My daughter does. Or she will. She is still young, but I already see her becoming aware of the differences. And you will not do this to her. You will not.
And so I must figure out how not to swim away in my own world, where I mostly live. I must be here and now. I must muster the energy.
