I am appalled by a song I heard today and I am breaking into my regularly scheduled whatever to blog about it.

There is a line in the song Wop, which is difficult for me to even talk about.  The singer compares his sexual temperature (so to speak) to a baby that has been burned to death in a microwave.

I am beyond disgusted.

Not only have there been cases of babies murdered this way (and their murderers have never faced justice), this is a simply barbaric thing to sing about.

I seriously believe that a society that holds any part in supporting, encouraging or even ignoring callous cruelty toward newborns is a dying faster than Rome.  To borrow the language of Jesus, we will owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology on in the Judgment.

For a person who tends to make people uncomfortable by confronting sexual assault, I find this post surprisingly difficult to write, especially since this is essentially a story about a crime averted. 

I know it is not because it is my story.  I know it is because this story skirts the border of what many people would find “normal.”  I am uncomfortable because it was not.

I had two tennis instructors and a tennis friend in high school.  The first instructor was a college student.  He was cute enough that I did not focus on my game.

I was most comfortable playing tennis with a neighbor boy who was several years younger than me.  We had a wonderful time playing across the street from our apartment building.  I was Martina and he was Boris and we just had fun. I am positive he was a better player than I was.

Then one day Y came along.  Y was a military fitness instructor and twice my age.  He “took” me “under his wing” in the sense that he gave me a lot of very good tennis lessons for free.  Even after all these years I know he was a very good tennis instructor.

Problem?   My friend Boris told me that when I was not around Y talked quite a bit about initiating a sexual relationship with me.  I was no more than sixteen.  It makes me mad now when I think about it.

It makes me mad because he could have hurt me.

and because he said things about and to me that were extremely inappropriate

and because for reasons I can only ascribe to their own discomfort, my parents never really did anything.

You could say Boris saved me.

I do.

Thanks Boris.  You were a great friend, a wonderful tennis partner, and a truth-teller.

If I had any idea where you were I would give you a big hug.

before the birth of disembodied words

i used to sit in train stations

and catch words in a net

ordinary words

people talking about Aunt Edna’s chicken soup

or how Jemal should not have done you like that

passion in public spaces

now I listen closely to the conversation of

friends

across cloudless skies

one complains about two red eyes

and the other quips:

red eyes usually come in pairs

I want to use exclamation marks

to tell this friendly stranger

the silly picture in my head,

a friendly monster rising surreptitiously just above

the horizon of an imaginary wall

his two red eyes

come in pairs.

for years and then one day at a store i was telling her about what happened to us, about the dead-end we reached when we realized “the system” had worked to protect C. not his past or future victims.

She told me she was a victim of sexual assault.  I was stunned that I had known her for years, she seems unflappable, and yet there was this terrible thing she had gone through.

I grieve for her.

You should know that “she” is a person who represents more women than I choose to count.  This is my private survivors day, the day I am dedicating to all the “ordinary” survivors of sexual assault.  They have the right to stay private, to keep their stories to themselves but when they look around at all the other people in the store they need to count every other five people.  At least sixty percent of the people I know have been the victims of some kind of assault.

I know these people’s stories because I told mine shamelessly.

Look around.

There were certain stories that haunted and informed me before and during our ordeal.  The story of a young girl being stolen from her own bedroom on threat of death, pain, her family’s destruction is so effacing.

The knowledge of her rape and torment, the lost and broken days is more heartbreaking.  I wish this were like a scene in a movie and each day were a paper or a dollar bill blown out by a strong wind and we could all gather around her and grab them back for her, order them for her, take years of her life and smooth them out in an orderly stack and return them to her,

unharmed…

Beautiful wisdom

beautiful daughter

I remember the day you came to me

like it was yesterday

like it was an idea that was bigger than me

you scared me, trapped behind my pelvis

like waves crashing into rock or

rocks crashing into pain

the oxygen mask/the fear

and then when we had already thought c-section?  i cant do this

cant someone else carry this pain for me?

like a cornered bird fluttering against the glass

this was the time your father asked me not to cry out

but I did cry

in shear relief and joy and more joy and more joy

beautiful wisdom

girl.

in “just” i call her melanie.  other times i call m, mel, magdalene.  she is my precious baby, even though she is not really my baby anymore.  she is the first child we had after we lost veronica and the day she was born i looked at her and knew that she was healing up a place in my heart, returning what the locusts had eaten.

the day we found out that sea was molesting saskia, m remembers coming home from rounds with her father and walking into the bedroom where sea was folding up the tent he made to molest his little sister.  she says he had a very angry look on his face.  i see the scene through her eyes, vividly.

she came into my bedroom where i was still talking to saskia and em and she heard what had happened.  she very, very calmly corroborated that he had abused her also, for years, until his abuse became more invasive and she understood from a sexual assault prevention lecture that she could ask him to stop.  he did and she never thought that he would abuse her little sister.  he abused her and yet she still had a basic level of trust in his humanity.  in her mind if he stopped abusing her then of course he would not abuse her little sister.

like em and me, melanie carries around an unshoulderable burden.  she knows now that if she had reported what he was doing to me or her father, the abuse would have stopped.

we tell  her it is not her fault.  and it isnt.

we tell her she could not have known, and that is true also

we tell her he fooled us too

and that it is all his fault, all the sin of it belongs to him

and yet this burden is something we all carry

there is no relief from the past, from things one cannot undo.

forgive me for applying a pseudo-letter here.  I hope your mom lets you read this but one way or the other I think Q is an excellent name–smacks of international espionage and such.

But that is not why I am writing.  I am writing because due to several rather LARGE DIFFICULT INTERVENING TRAGEDIES, I thought I had lost you and your whole beautiful family.  I had always wanted to be a very good __________ to you.  If your mama lets you read this you will know what word goes in the blank but for anyone else reading consider the mad libs! (beekeeper, ringleader, Oktoberfest organizer, primate handler…)

So it sounds like you are hitting a rough patch.  First let me say that I love you and think you have great potential.  Next let me say that the time of life you are in can feel like a real garbage dump outside the holy city, or put another way–the pits.  sometimes a body is inclined to do somethings like  1. kick the cat  2.  be mean to younger kids 3.  say rude things 4.  blame one’s parents.

Let’s start with the last thing for now:  one’s parents.  I had a great dad and I loved him very, very much, but he was not perfect (no sirrr–eee) and when I would feel a little down because my father tended to be a leetle too critical sometimes (he liked to catch a body doing something goofy and then correct them thoroughly).  Like if he were an English teacher he would correct me right now for using them instead of he or she.

Also. he was not very affectionate.  Kind, intelligent, loyal, truthful, adventerous on occasion, but not cuddly.  I needed a big-bear-i-love-you-dad.  Luckily I found Him.  Or He let me find Him, like divine hide and seek.  Over time I realized He was always there. waiting for me to ask the right question and that question was–

are You there?  are You real?

This is a question worth asking because once i realized He was there I also felt His great love.  You don’t wanna miss out on that.  God is the dad we need, we all secretly look for.

As another young friend of mine used to say–

our REAL Dad.

He’s the One who teaches us how to be.

love you kid,

E.