#YouKnowMe
These abortion laws being passed in Georgia and throughout red states have my southern soul in a state of blessed unrest.
In other words, these issues strike deep into the core of my being, creating movement. This inability to comfortably hold this latest assault on security and well being of inhabitants of our land calls for action. Action, whether it is pacing angrily across the floor or screaming on Facebook with friends reveals discomfort. The hammer finally struck my nail.
Birth control, abortion rights are rallying calls I can’t ignore. When one looks at my life, it is a tapestry created by abilities and inabilities to create a chosen destiny, patterned by monthly moons, making love, having children and dealing with southern white males.
Women have emerged from 1000’s of years of systematic abuse to have a vote and bodily autonomy only for the last century. In all of recorded Western history, women have been possessed by men and their institutions. We have been so oppressed and conditioned to oppression, many think we should return to those “simpler times”.
We have emerged, are rising like volcanoes in chaotic creation from the center of our beings. We will not be boxed up, piled upon the migrants, the poor, the people of color already stuffed deep into this box. Women intersect every oppressed category. We are ubiquitous.
It’s the final straw, these last remaining voices of dissent, and then those creepy white men holding the reigns of power can relax. If they can just cram us in there.
I won’t go back in the box.
I was born in Georgia and lived nowhere else for almost six decades. In the sixties and seventies, when I was little, my mama worked for family and children services with unwed mothers. Somewhere in there, abortion was legalized and birth control became widespread. My mama was nearly ecstastic with these developments after seeing families torn apart and young girls having unwanted, babies everyday. Or young girls who wanted their child, but their inconvenient fate lay outside their control. She was definitely for bodily autonomy. I breathed this as daily fare from an exhausted mama coming home from work every night.
I had my own choices to make. Like many (many more than now admit) I made use of sexual freedom. I took pills and had an iud.
I married and had a child. That’s when things got dicey. That’s when patriarchy, that systematic oppression of many to benefit a few, began wrapping his tentacles around my life.
Working full time, a baby in day care with constant earaches, up all night, responsible for all meals and transportation. Responsible for a lawyer husband and his to be neatly ironed white shirts, and meals he never showed up for. Turned out that first ex thought all things having to do with the care of family and household was a woman’s job. My job specifically. One I was colossally unprepared for.
Let’s again add more details. This was middle Georgia, home of Capricorn Records. Rock and roll, drugs, massive amounts of alcohol completes the scene. As Gregg Allman put it, I‘m no angel. I was tied to my whipping post. I had a rambling man.
My life contained evil secretaries, terminally ill family members, a full time job, a bit of cocaine and a lot of alcohol riddling my system. To my horror, I found I was pregnant again, right before my son, this small creature holding my heart hostage, turned one year old.
My husband angrily accosted me, “you just had to have the first one, you must have this one”.
I left. My boss and his wife took to me to Atlanta where my sister and brother-in-laws took care of me overnight. I had an abortion.
I went home to my husband. That toxic marriage lasted another six years.
That is one story. One story of me wresting some kind of control out of the pure chaos my life had become.
But it is enough to feed my blessed unrest for a moment. I have more to say. Much more.
