I first read about this story in a book on the Khans.  Ogedei was supposed to be Genghis’ favorite son.  If you read his bio on Wikipedia he sounds like a reasonably interesting alcoholic/benevolent dictator.  Until you get to the elliptical part about the little girls. (who were victims of “war violence…)

The story goes like this: Ogedei wants to humiliate a tribe so he rounds up 4000 girls from 7 to 15 years old and their male relatives.  Then he subjects all the girls to war violence for the rest of the day (in front of their brothers and fathers)

Then he sells the ones who survive off as concubines and prostitutes.

War violence.  Hell of a euphemism.

These stories haunt me, and just as with the book I feel an obsessive need to apologize for reminding people of them.  Blame George Santayana for this. 

And sometimes when the darkness encroaches my story and stories worse than mine I feel compelled to speak out loud the foundational Christian idea that Jesus took all the darkness all the pain for these little girls, for their families, for my little girls, for my little family.

How could He?  How hopeless I would be without Him.

Everybody knows this story, right?  Terrible and bat the same time I applaud Jaycee for speaking and writing about her abuse.

Clearly the system failed Jaycee.

Worse still, our experience with the system (of justice) strongly suggests that thousands upon thousands of identified sexual predators are thrown back into unsuspecting communities every day–no parole officer, no sex offender registration, no public record; without these things it is harder to sue when a sex offender strikes again.

And even more importantly, children are not safe.

Was just a teenager when Thomas Jefferson initiated a sexual relationship with her.  She was his slave.  There is no way to construe this as a consensual liaison.  He didn’t even free his children by her (two ran, the others were freed by his daughter, their half-sister/cousin).

By today’s standards for sexual assault and consent,  established by the FBI, Thomas Jefferson would be a rapist and a pedophile.

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.