17 August 2015

Here She Comes

Any moment now I am hoping to hear news of a new niece, the new daughter of my brother and sister-in-law.

And I can't help feeling sad about saying that in this moment I am thinking of a missing limb in her family architecture. My and my brother's father is my about-to-be niece's grandfather. But of his four surviving children -- me, my sister, my half-brother, and half-sister -- not one of us wants him around us.

I tried for years as an adult to get to know my father when my husband and I moved back to our hometown. I wasn't willing to simply extend forgiveness to my father without first being asked for forgiveness. So I took steps toward rebuilding a relationship with him. I had dinner with him at his house and hosted him at mine. I went river rafting with him.

And after all of that benefit-of-the-doubt giving, and getting to know him again, I decided I still did not trust him with my well being. I found my line in the sand: I knew I never again wanted to be in a car with him at the wheel.

Once this became clear, I sat down with him on the banks of Boulder Creek one day and asked him to apologize for subjecting me and my mother and our whole family to extremes of exposure to danger and abuse and neglect.

If he apologized that day, it was purely perfunctory. My father never acknowledged half of what I asked about. He explained himself, and proffered disclaimers: "I don't remember that at all," he said about my claims that he had hit my mother and stepmother and slammed my mother's head against the kitchen door until she saw stars.

When my sister told me she was molested when she was little, I felt waves of terrible, complicated feelings. I felt sick and angry for her, for what had been taken from her. I had the terrible thought: "I should have been able to protect her" -- all the more terrible because I had already lost another sister to an accident that happened when I wasn't with her. (I was miles away at the time of the accident, but for many years felt things would have turned out differently if I had been there.) I felt worry: "Will my sister ever think of the time I rubbed up against her in the car that day when I was 11 and she was 4 as being molested?" For a long time, I felt a kind of survivor's guilt: "Thank goodness I wasn't molested when I was a kid."

But then I remember.

I remember how extremely limited my power was as a child, limited by the sounds of my mother's and stepmother's shrieks, my father's shrill verbal lashings, and his smashing of fists and slamming of heads against walls.

I remember my fear as I listened, frozen in agony about whether to try to do something or stay still and quiet in my room. Only later did it occur to me that everyone screaming must have known we children weren't asleep. By then my sister would have silently come into my room and we would have huddled under my blankets together in our fear cave and waited for the storm to end. I had visions of someone ending up dead but usually our father either melted into a puddle of self-pity at the end and passed out drunk in his recliner or he bolted in anger, slamming the door behind him and roaring off in his car to disappear for anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

I remember wondering why my mother and then my stepmother wanted him back.

I remember not wanting to live with him anymore because I never knew what was going to be happening at home.

I remember not wanting my friends to come over in case they crossed his path on a bad day. If they met him on a good day, it was worse because then they would never comprehend how scary he could be. Because my father could be so charming after he'd washed the day's dank auto grease off his hands and had a cold beer and a hard day's work behind him and my mother or stepmother was in the kitchen cooking dinner. He could be so smart and curious, so expansive and erudite. (I see now that a neighbor of mine who recently moved away unnerved me sometimes. My neighbor shared so many of my father's positive traits that part of me was on guard, waiting for that proverbial other shoe to be drop at any moment and he would turn brutish or explode in familiar counterpoint to a joyfully intellectual conversation.)

I remember a day when I was in bed trying to nap one afternoon about ten years ago. I couldn't let myself go into sleep. My mind raced, my heart pounded, and as I lay curled up on my side although I was fully clothed I felt my bottom was exposed and vulnerable. This felt more like a flashback than any other experience I have ever had. When I understood I was feeling I had been molested, I cried and wailed with grief and fury. To this day I don't know if what I experienced that afternoon was a memory of what happened to me or a reaction to feelings constructed from my experience and my sister's history.

Tonight -- just tonight, at the age of 52 -- I thought, even if my father didn't molest me personally, I am still angry. I am angry at him for crowding me and my sisters and our mothers into small spaces where we were supposed to stay weak and scared and violable. I am still angry at him for subjecting me to a culture that excuses the sick and twisted things powerful men do and minimizes opportunities for women and girls to do great and beautiful and meaningful things. I am angry because he hid his wealth from his family at his family's expense. I am angry because my mother is poor and suffers while he's off enjoying his millions.

So: I admit, I still haven't forgiven him.

I'm just now learning to forgive myself for not having fully let go of all of this attachment I feel to that flaming, righteous anger that flares up or surfaces as PTSD, causing flashbacks or crippling crises of confidence. It took me from age six to about ten years ago to forgive myself for not being there when my sister died. I have to forgive myself for not being able to protect my little sister from the man or men who stole sex from her when she was far too young to give consent.

I have found help and compassionate understanding in Brené Brown's work on vulnerability and shame and Byron Katie's process of taking apart the stories in our heads. These give me some perspective on who holds me back when I feel fear (big hint: it's not usually fathers or parents or ungrateful kids or partners or passive-aggressive friends or mean bosses). But even with these great tools readily at hand and heart, it is still not easy to forgive and let go of these feelings.

Yet every day I know I have to be kind and compassionate with myself and all my sisters. And I have to keep surrounding myself with people like my brother and sisters and husband and friends and family -- big-hearted people who believe in giving our children and women and men opportunities to grow and flourish. I know I have to work every day to make this world a safer and sturdier place for my nieces and sisters and mother and me. After all, my new niece might have big dreams. I want to make sure our world is ready for her.

07 August 2015

What I Like About Planned Parenthood

I have shared many times since my parents' good advice. When I was about fifteen they sat down with me when I asked them to, and they said: "Don't sleep with anyone you're not 100 percent sure you really like and trust. If you feel reservations, listen to those instincts and don't do it, because there's no going back."

So I didn't sleep with the person I was seeing then, or another person I dated after that. And I was glad, during and after. Those guys both broke up with me after that, which was fine with me. A while later I fell in love with someone I had known for several years. Suddenly he just looked so interesting and he had stuff going on in his mind that was funny and sharp and smart and he liked music maybe even as much as I did. We were in the same friend group and had started pairing off with other people when we looked up, looked at each other, and said, "Wait, you're the one that I want."

Throughout my childhood, truly as early as I can remember, I knew about bodies and sex because they were all around me. I spent a few of my formative years in the middle of seas of people who were exploring their bodies, minds, senses -- you name it and they were exploring it. I spent hours in Golden Gate Park, and in the flow and swirl of a hundred parties and concerts and love-ins when people ingested substances, dropped their inhibitions, and did things they never would have done back home, wherever that was.

But my personality is now as it was then both flamboyant and joyful as well as shy at the core. Back then I felt some dissonance. There was tension between what I wanted and what everyone around me wanted. One of my mother and father's friends, a tall, bearish fellow with frizzy honey-colored hair whom I loved and trusted like a dear uncle, once told me, "You don't have to be modest," when I covered my chest after realizing I had worn overalls with no shirt underneath. His well intentioned advice had the exact opposite effect on me, however; I felt exposed and embarrassed about wanting to be modest.

Because my mother had become pregnant with me back in 1962 without knowing much about how babies and anything else worked, she didn't want me to be a victim of that kind of ignorance. She gave birth to my sister at home, and she became a midwife when I was about 10 to help other families have their babies at home. The facts of life were all around us. My mother spent many hours telling me things at various times I was ready and not ready to hear. I am still grateful for her help diagnosing and solving a potentially dangerous problem I had once.

One of the best tools my mother ever gave me was Planned Parenthood. From being a midwife, and her own experience, she knew plenty about people who had babies before they were ready. She was always grateful for the existence of Planned Parenthood and she made sure I knew it was there if and when I needed it.

These days, clinics tend to mark out the names of the people who checked in before you at their reception desks, but back when I was fifteen and went to learn about my contraception options, seeing my classmates' names on the sheet made me feel good about checking in at the Planned Parenthood clinic. My mother asked whether I wanted her to come along and I had my first clinic visit with her present. I felt comfortable going on my own after that. When I was sixteen, I had a stressful moment that ended a week later when my Aunt Flo finally arrived . Not that we called my period that back then -- no euphemisms at our house! And everything worked flawlessly after that -- I was scrupulous in my use of contraception, and got to know the loving man who would nine years later become my husband (and to whom I am still married). Planned Parenthood was there for me -- for us.

I know some of our relatives might find my personal history shocking, but I am still so thankful for that time and space in my life. I had so many stresses at that time with trying to do well in school in preparation for college, and a custody battle in which I was finally standing up to my father and asking to live with my mother for a year before I graduated high school. I still feel that the intimacy my sweetheart and I shared during those difficult years made all the difference in how bearable my life was.

I saw more and more of my friends' names on my Planned Parenthood clinic's sign-in sheets over the next few years. I appreciated the support I felt for my teenage self's need to explore and be protected, and I appreciated having that support into my adulthood. Even though I now have insurance coverage and can see a network specialist for my gynecological needs, I continue to support Planned Parenthood because I appreciate their support fo my and other women's reproductive health and our autonomy and self-determination.