Untitled Pandemic Journal

March 2020

A rolling, thundering sky
The clanging repercussion of
Fat raindrops beating against an outdoor grill On a brilliantly green spring afternoon.
I can smell the rain.
I can feel the air.
That’s when I know I have found my serenity.

If we don’t tell our stories, someone else will.

I want to hear your stories, voiceless women of the past. What brought you peace? What brought you solace? What were your struggles and your solutions? Did you yearn for equality the way I do now?

How did you live through the loss of so many babies?
What use were your husbands to you? When you were raped, did anyone know?

When you lived in teepees in matriarchal tribes, what worried you most? Scarcity of food? Attacking animals, or attacking men?

Among the settlers & colonizers, how did you feel about being church-conditioned not to speak there, to obey? Was there ever really a time when women comfortably accepted that place? Was obedience what you strived for? Have we always strived to be pleasing in the way men tell us is pleasing? Where sex-appeal is the heirarchy now, was it obedience then?

And how did it feel, to an obedient mother, watching a man slay a native boy the same age as her own?

And the plantation owners’ wives - what were the private thoughts of a woman married to a man who believed himself justified in calling people property? What passed between the eyes of the wives married to men they despised and the enslaved women around them?

Whose story is it that women in our history must have loved the men they married, in a time when marrying men was a necessity and divorce was not an option?

I don’t want them to tell my story - the men. The writers & historians & politicians & directors & producers. As though they know the secrets of women. They don’t. And I’m tired of the lie that I am alone.

Women and POC may have been denied education for centuries, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t think. Yet when historians recount the prevalent political thinking of the day, they aren’t recounting the thinking of the enslaved, or the subjugated gender of the Christian church. “Popular” opinions, ideas, thinking, theology - only white men had a voice, be it in the papers, at the pulpit, or from political office.

28% now - the voice of 28%, still shouting down the rest. White men have NEVER been a majority in America. But, my, their voice is loud.

22 April

I don’t know what feelings are. Like, how to name and identify them. Irene recently taught me. Maybe a year and a half ago, I was sitting in her office and she asked me “how does that feel?”

I was at a loss.
“In your body,” she said. “Where do you feel it?”
“In my chest.”
“What does it feel like?”
It hurt. “Tight. Painful. Like there’s a rock in my chest dragging me into darkness.” “What would you call it?”
“Like, a word? An emotion?”
“Yes.”
“Distraught. Overwhelmed. Hopeless,” I blurted. “That sounds so dramatic.” Irene didn’t say anything.

This is what feelings are? I thought. Like, FEEL-ings? As in, people literally feel them, in their bodies, in different places in their bodies, and each one feels different? As in, I could think about what my body feels like - a sensation in my stomach, for example - and find recognizable, repeating experiences I could label, regularly and accurately, as “sad” or “scared”?

“Now sit up straight,” she said.
I thought I had been. I teach yoga. I believed I had great posture.
She kept saying it. It took three times, I think; I hadn’t thought I could sit up any straighter.
Finally, I totally straightened my spine and lengthened my neck, upright, in what I thought

would feel like a soldier at attention. “How does that feel?”

It felt very different. I was so surprised. “Better. Stronger.”

It felt like I wasn’t weighed down in the dark. It feels less like I’m at the mercy of the merciless.

That experience - the “before” - makes me think, now, of the Adrian character in the movie Rocky, and of whipped dogs; hunched, head down, looking up sideways and skittish. And it makes me wonder, now, about Hollywood producers (and writers and directors and movie-goers) who find that appealing in a woman. Or character. Or love-interest.

29 April
Today I lost my balance. An angry man ran into his friend and started venting, shouting

obscenities over his frustration with current affairs. Trump’s bleach-drinking suggestion, and the reaction to it.

I couldn’t sit with it.

I was on the bridge, where I was doing yoga. The tagged “troll” bridge on the bike path - the idyllic setting where I’ve been meditating and getting exercise during stay-at-home orders.

When it’s rained recently, you can hear the water swirling and eddying downstream, beneath what was once upon a time a steel train bridge, now paved for cyclists and pedestrians, along the path of practically untouched woods. At first, the trees stood quietly like a forest fairytale, leafless wet-dark trunks scattered across gently undulating ground covered with such low overgrowth it seemed blanketed by moss. Each week, the woods came more alive. Blooming dogwoods perfumed the air. Great clusters of sweet-smelling lavender-colored flowers flagged the approach to the river. These were replaced by redbuds and butterflies, then fuschia clusters of flowers I remembered from my childhood home, now wild roses and tiny yellow flowers sprinkled like confetti along the edges of the path. Tufts of cottonwood seeds are beginning to float about, replacing the golden seeds that showered down as I sat meditating on the bridge a couple of weeks ago.

That is the spot where I sat when I realized “enough” is enough; that taking in deep, clean breaths, drinking clear water, feeling a healthy stretch - being aware one’s basic needs are met, and being grateful - enjoying it - is what it’s all about. At that moment, an owl had called out to me.

I had set my intention for this full moon to stay grounded in that.

And then the man came and cursed. My energy was disrupted. I knew I should sit, and meditate, but I couldn’t do it. I criticized myself. I was angry that the man felt so entitled - not felt - IS so entitled to behave with no respect for strangers around him. Had I been a man his own size or bigger, he would have gauged if I were opposed to his point of view. He undoubtedly would have been quieter. I was angry at my silence. And my fear. And most of all, the knowledge that ours is a culture that justifies my fear to even speak against him.

The negative energy multiplied over days to obsessive thinking. I became unable to focus on the present moment, even walking in the woods or soaking in the bath. My frustration with others grew - Sunday when my sister ghosted me, Monday with H-----’s at-home school work, my employer re-opening the gym, claiming without evidence they can protect people, Tuesday spending two hours on hold trying to find a way to complete my yoga recertification without attending CPR training in person.

My tension got enough that the muscles in my neck threatened to freeze, so I turned to yoga. Candle, incense, mat...enter H-----, saying he was lonely. He started examining my crystals, quietly, sweetly, excited to clean them and make them “shiny.”

I let go. I accepted. My energy cleared. So did his.

We did “spa night” in the bedroom while S---- slept in front of the TV in the living room. At 2:30am, pomegranate & gold-dusted peel-off face masks, lavender and orange essential oils (H-----’s choice), candles, warmed corn sacks, and Zen music. And I remembered to FEEL how I felt, and to do what makes me feel better.

Beltane (May 2020)
Some people are begging for normal, desperate to “go back” to the way things were.

Not me. I’m praying every day for more change.
I suspect the protesters - the anti-stay-at-homers - the people who can’t stand it, have

found they can’t stand being alone with themselves, can’t stand the lives they’ve created for themselves. I have re-discovered how much I like my own company. I have discovered that so much of modern life is busy work, and distraction.

Early on, in the first few weeks of isolation, I began realizing how much I don’t need. Cranberry muffins. I enjoy cranberry muffins, with a cup of Earl Vanilla tea, and I ran out. Then I had to decide: go to the store and expose myself and therefore everyone I live with to shoppers possibly spreading Covid, or not. It seemed scary at the time. Suddenly it wasn't safe to go to the store; I was in danger. I would have to do without...cranberry muffins. I became acutely aware of how accustomed I am to having superfluous luxuries on demand.

At my last Friday-before-shutdown grocery stop, I had supposed I ought to buy a bit more than usual. Fellow shoppers, though, seemed to be preparing for I did not even know what. They piled their carts high with cases of canned goods, ignoring the signs posted on the door defining the limits. I wondered, ẅould they argue with the cashier? Were they expecting to spend the next month re-heating & eating entire meals of over-salted, over-cooked vegetables to survive? ̈I don't know what the future will bring, ̈ I said to the cashier, ̈but I’m pretty sure we aren’t in danger of starving.”

So I laughed at myself over my muffin anxiety, and began re-evaluating what, exactly, it is that I need. To feel SAFE.

And that is what I really want. To be able to articulate that.

The more time I spend “introspecting,” - finding my peace, my balance, meeting a higher power - the more aware I become of what I see now as distractions from that, and about exposure to people who disrupt it.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales & hills, When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten-thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

William Wordsworth

No, I don’t want to go back. For “the world is too much with us, and I have laid waste my powers.” I have much control over my space. I find peace here. And serenity. And joy. Today is Beltane, and I write from my hammock, admiring the brilliant green leaves on the trees, the ripple of waves the breeze brings from across the pond, and I am liberated from obligations, plans & expectations.

3 May
My rapist sent me a friend request on Facebook. 28 minutes ago, it said. 28 minutes ago, the boyfriend who sodomized me at 17, when I was passed out drunk on New Year’s Eve, had his eyes on my photo, had his name in my mind. I wonder if he had that frat-boy smirk on his face when he clicked “send request.”

Was it 17, or 16? Trauma memories aren’t really different in that sense from other high school memories, as far as tracking timelines. Someday I’ll think about it long enough to figure it out.

4 May
Today, I hiked under the trestle train bridge on the bike path. The cottonwoods were whispering and shushing, dusting the air, making the world come alive with soft fluffs of seeds. The water trickled and swirled around the river bend, catching and reflecting light and shadow, dancing overhead in the canopy of trees.

The riverbank was soft and smooth, silt made bare by recent rain, imprinted with the trail of rushing water and the tracks of at least three animals, the largest apparently a bobcat, my research revealed. I found the bare bleached skull of a possum on the way down. I pressed it gently into the mud along the river bank, where I’d be able to see it from above. Gretel, I named her, now a blank face peering back at me from the tall grass. I crossed beneath the bridge and found a less steep slope to the water’s edge, along with a smooth-silt spot in the shade. The breeze off the cool water was like natural air-conditioning. Still, the stretch to cup the water was long, but it was worth it. The drink I managed was clear and cold.

5 May
“Why?” my sister asked yesterday when I told her about the Fb request. She was incredulous, but still...why do people keep asking me that? As though I could possibly have an answer. My husband did the same thing. Except he has asked why he had sodomized me. I asked him why he would ask me that. He said just to try to talk about it, I guess. Which I was okay with. I guess.

8 May
Honor and respect. Isn’t that what we all want? Grocery store clerks & garbage collectors, risking exposure so we can all eat and maintain a normal semblance of life. They’re paid a pittance and have no health insurance - a hospitalization would surely bankrupt them. Having a sick child would require a choice between a doctor visit and basic necessities.

We claim we honor and respect them - by saying “thanks” and ignoring the laws of our culture that control their situation. The more things we have, the less attention we pay to each one. The more people, the less connection.

My therapist recommended I write a confrontation letter. I feel weak and small and pleading; that doesn’t lend itself to initiating confrontation, even in writing.

13 May
I fear being dismissed as crazy, traumatized, damaged. Psycho bitch. I have always been terrified that if I stop hiding the pain & trauma, my husband would use it against me in a divorce, to take my son.

16 May
I feel so crazy. All the people around me are behaving in direct contradiction to every bit of factual information I have.
My sister-in-law sent a group text; attendance at my nephew’s high school graduation is limited. No surprise; perhaps they’re planning for social distancing. So, she adds, she “would love for us ALL to come” to an after party at her home. There were at least 30 people in the text. I’m stunned.

Ousted vaccine official Rick Bright testified before the US Senate today that we may be in for “the darkest winter in modern history” if we don’t start taking scientists seriously. Just now, I googled the current death toll. Instead of the toll, I got an article from The Guardian quoting Tucker Carlson from Fox News indicating his belief that the death toll numbers are being deliberately inflated. How do these people imagine that works exactly? The New York Times makes up a number and every other news agency on earth agrees to repeat it? The people reporting it to the media are lying? ALL of them? Every hospital, every health department in the US is in on it?

I asked my husband for his thoughts on the invite.

He said he was thinking about calling his sister to see if she wanted to have the party at our house. I feel like I’m spinning, watching the world blur & smear, like on an amusement park ride. I’ve never seriously questioned the nature of reality before. I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m literally physically isolated from every person I identify with, except my son. They’re out there, my family and friends. I see images of them on video, and hear their voices over the phone, the same way I get my fact-based, scientific evidence; digitally, from afar, like television programs or characters in movies.

Here, in the physical world that I actually exist in, that I see in three dimensions, hear binaurally, sense and smell; the people around me act with utter oblivion to the digital images & information I believe is real.

It’s the ultimate gaslight. I fear if I stop resisting I’ll be washed out with the tide of conspiracists, no bigger than a mote of dust, clutching uselessly for an impossibly receding shoreline, eroded into oblivion. It’s like I’m fighting to exist. To exist in a reality where things I can’t see are still real. Germs exist. Millions of people the world over are staying inside their homes; I can’t see them, but they exist. Other people like me, who believe in science, exist. Evidence-based decision making comes from factual reality. It is observably real. Right? Right. Right. Right.

20 May
Images today. Swiping through my photo file, I came across a pic I sent my sister of a man with a war weapon slung over his shoulder, screaming, enraged, inside his state capitol building. When I took my 5th grade son and 6th grade niece to my state capitol last year to support the teacher’s strike, we weren’t allowed to even stand on the capitol steps - a crowd heavy with women and children pleading for textbooks.

Yet here are these rage-filled white men, behaving in a way that would be described if it were coming from a black or Middle Eastern man as “threatening” or “out-of-control”; or coming from a woman as “hysterical” or “unhinged.” Don’t get me wrong - some white women stand with these men, but they are only tolerated because they’re “standing by their man.” If they were acting independently as a group of women, no way.

They’re frightening. And they are in control. They are the minority. But then they always have been, both in control and the minority. The slave owners. The Indian killers. The men delivering smallpox tainted blankets, and the men mounted on horses forcing mothers to keep marching while carrying their dead babies. The ones who pried screaming children from their mothers’ arms and sold them, for money.

They are out of the woodwork, these men. And the entire political machine has moved to placate rather than arrest them. Their hate and rage and the message of their AR-15s is terrorizing. Who can stand against them? Women who have been beaten & raped? POC, who look, to those men, like Ahmaud Arbery did to the men who killed him? “We can beat, rape, kill people like you with impunity,” says not just our history, but our own life experiences. Those men know it, and I wonder today if it has ever been any other way. Certainly not in America’s “united” states.

25 May
People who have the power to determine what actions/behaviors are criminal and which are acceptable:

Men 70%, Women 30%
People who have the power to decide who to arrest and who to leave free:

Men 88%, Women 12%
People who decide who will go to jail and for how long, and who will go free:

Men 67%, Women 33%

A need for money is not a desire for sex. Wanting to be freed from police is not desire for sex. Wanting a job or a promotion is not desire for sex. Yet men take sex from women in these positions and, because they alone have the power to do so, say this is not rape.

........

“There are more of them than us,” said Minnesota’s governor today. Not more rioters than police. Not more protesters than National Guard. More of them than us. “We” are divided, again, into groups of only two, with government leadership clearly choosing one group over another. Is George Floyd’s family a “them” or an “us”? Tamir Rice’s mother? Philando Castille’s partner, Diamond Reynolds? What about the dead woman in Kentucky, Breonna Taylor, shot by police who wrongly imagined drugs in her home? Sandra Bland? The woman playing Xbox late at night with her nephew, whose neighbor called the police because her front door was open, who the police then shot and killed through her own window?

“Whoops,” Amerika says to these men. “We understand. Mistake. You still deserve to be paid by the public to protect and serve.” Protect and serve whom, exactly, “us,” or “them”? Today, we kill black-skinned Americans with police guns instead of nooses. I know the rural white Americans around me think it’s different now than it was then. They think the 1960’s were Mississippi Burning: cut and dried, good & bad guys. They always envision themselves as the hero. Never the bad guy. And certainly never the victim. So, they never learn empathy. And the camera (who is always & always holding & directing that camera, do you know?) never, ever pans to the hoard of silent, do-nothing bystanders, so they never recognize themselves.

There is no historical record of the the average white men saying, “well, nobody really knows what happened,” when other white men lynched black men and claimed they whistled at a white girl - Emmit Till - or attacked a white girl elevator operator - Dick Rowland, or the many countable other claims supplied by white lynchmen as documented in Ida Wells’ Red Papers. Murder, with impunity.

MLK preached peaceful protest. I respect & honor & understand his POV, but honestly, where has that gotten us? Where has peaceful protest gotten American women? My next door neighbor shot herself in the head a few weeks ago; she ultimately didn’t survive being raped. And who cares? What action has been taken to prevent it happening again - the rape OR the suicide? To even prevent the same man from doing it again?

For a long time, I didn’t look. I didn’t look at the videos. I believed I knew what I would see - an ambiguous scenario without enough context to make a clear judgement about what happened.

I was so wrong.

What I saw was Ms. Reynold’s child, the same age as my own, in the backseat of the car. I saw her partner, who had the concealed-carry permit like my husband wants, reach to his shirt, saying here’s my permit. And he killed him. A uniformed police officer shot a man a few feet from an eight-year-old child. He put the child, like a criminal, into the backseat of a police car - this man, whom she had just watched kill a father-figure. And then they forced her mother, under threat of being shot in front of her child, to get on her knees, turn her back to them all, and lie down while they climbed atop her and handcuffed her, like a criminal, while her partner’s dead body lay motionless in the passenger seat of her car.

White Americans generally put themselves in the cop’s shoes (After all, that is the angle our Hollywood directors & producers have given them.) I wonder often what it would feel like for those white Americans to watch dramatizations of actual events where the race roles were all changed, where the people with the power were all black and the people killed by them are all white. A white mother trying to get to her dead child being threatened by police with arrest if she doesn’t calm down.A school-aged white girl being tackled and thrown to the ground by a full-grown, armed black man in uniform. A black man in a police cruiser tearing into a public park full of children, jumping out and within 3 seconds gunning down a white sixth-grader playing with his toy gun.

I’ve heard people talk about not looking at color. I know that could only ever work in a society in which discrimination based on skin color is as unlikely as discrimination based on hair- or eye-color. Being “color-blind” is being blind to racial injustice. Now, I see color. I see that the men with assault rifles screaming & enraged inside capitol buildings are white, and I try to imagine their faces as black. It’s impossible. A black man would have to be suicidal to even arrive armed at the building; to even go into any public space in America with an AR15 slung over his shoulder; to even scream in rage like that at any white person in public.

Campaigning politicians say “this only harms us all.”
“We” so much prefer when harm is only coming to “them.”
Liberty and justice for all has never existed in this country. Not when Christians called Native Americans heathens and savages and marched them to their deaths so “we” could hand their property to white immigrants; not when “we” called black Americans slaves and forced them to enrich the offspring of those white immigrants; not when we called the children of black mothers property and took them from their mothers’ arms without a whisper of a chance of their ever seeing each other again.

9 June
I went to my nephew’s graduation party, despite my firmly held belief that a gathering of 40+ people is irresponsible, at best. I had thought I could stay outside. Mostly, though, I realized there was no point in isolating myself if my husband and son were going to go anyway, and then come back to share our home. They were going to go with or without me. They were going to hug a dozen people who wouldn’t wear masks. They were going to touch shared surfaces - the tea dispenser, the screen door, the toilet handle; the shared single hand towel beside the basin. There was no point in staying home. So I went.

My mother-in-law came - 70ish smoker, just out of the hospital in February with pneumonia for the 2nd time in two years.

I went to the grad party, putting myself at risk. Or, perhaps my husband & his family put me at risk, no matter my choice.

Today, I did not refuse to shake hands with the elderly homeowner on our job site. When our machine jammed, the man volunteered to help us, standing in the June sun, heads close together. He was tremendously kind. I worried about heat exhaustion, about completing the job before time ran out for the day. Not until I got home did I think about whether I may have breathed potentially lethal air into his face.

I’ve been trying to be cautious, to avoid contact. Therapy and meetings with friends by Zoom. No vacations this year. Standing coffee dates with my aunt, cancelled. Grocery shopping only once every 2 1⁄2 to 3 weeks. Planned meals, research on prolonging the life of produce, eating what’s quickest to spoil first.

I get my exercise alone, on a sparsely used bike path. And it’s beautiful. Peaceful.

Drive-thru dining out only. I call it picnicking in the car. I used to do it with H----- when he was little. The first night we went through a drive thru. We put the seats back, stretched out, opened the windows, let in the spring breeze and watched the moon rise while we ate. Since then, we’ve picked up and eaten full restaurant meals in the car. These are our trips into the world, watching the public move by in cars.

Now, it’s hot. The kind of hot where radio ads in Oklahoma remind people that leaving their children or pets in the car can be deadly. The heat index at the graduation party had been easily over 100 degrees. “The grads were melting on the field,” my sister-in-law said. She had wanted to play games outside - croquet, bean bag toss - but the heat was intolerable. “If it had been when it was supposed to be in May...” she trailed. I felt how robbed she was of the last parent-child party she would throw for her son before he moved away from home.

“I’m doing hugs,” she said when we arrived, as I surveyed with shock the number of people, “but I respect other people’s choices if they aren’t.” I held back. S---- didn’t. More people approached. S---- gave more hugs. If my husband hugs everyone here, what is the use of my not doing so, I wondered. And gave in. “Glad you came, glad you came, S---- didn’t know if you would, she really wanted you to,” I heard over and over, and believed it to be Southern in-law speak meant to confirm the general family relief that I, the outlier in-law, had not denied them the presence of their favored son as they feared I would.

The other sister-in-law meanwhile, had suddenly stopped hearing from her son, who had recently joined the military and was set to go to South Korea the next week. I wondered if he had been sent on the president’s orders to DC, to be one of the troops Trump was threatening to command against protestors, against people like me. I didn’t say so.

I could see the fear in her eyes when she mentioned Korea. I doubted it had occurred to her he could be deployed here, in the US, or what that might be like for him. I wondered if she had started paying attention to “world affairs” / “current events”/ “politics”/ or “Mainstream Media” since she’d found out about his deployment.

Sometimes, when we’re terrified, the worst thing is to see that someone sees our terror. It’s a kind of breaking. It’s why my aunt didn’t call this week when my uncle went in to have a balloon put in his heart. It’s why I don’t call my mom when I’m trying to power through. It’s why my son, as he becomes so much more male and stops being just a human kid, will stop looking me in the eye when he’s in emotional pain.

I saw Sannon’s fear, and my eye contact was like a glancing blow. Not even a second, really. I looked away as quickly as I could, because there’s no good that could come from her seeing in the eyes of the most informed person she knows that I believe her fear is justified.

Trump, or someone with more reasonable thinking and a keen power of persuasion, pulled the troops back. My socially-awkward, video-gaming, 21-year-old nephew was not, thankfully, ordered to beat American protestors with billy clubs on what would have been his first trip to the National Mall. An American soldier whose mom described him once as so afraid of black people that he abandoned the window of her food truck when a group of black customers walked up last summer.

L—-- said as I turned from S------ she didn’t think normal was ever going to be the same. “No,” I agreed. “The world is changing, and I’m ready for it to change.”

So now, I’m scrutinizing every sensation. Is my throat sore? Why did H----- have a headache? Was it really just the sun? When I have coffee with my aunt on Thursday, for the first time in 2 months, and on her front porch, will my staying 6 feet from her really keep her safe? A month ago, I would have given a hard no to a coffee date. But today...

Today, I read that the protester in our city who was intentionally run over by a man with a truck and trailer with a gun on the dash, is paralyzed. For life. With a broken back. And no charges have been filed. No arrests made. No information released. And I have no one to talk to about that. It’s so much. So much. Weeks’ worth of police brutality, too many videos to even find and see. Grown men dressed for riot; mace, guns, billy clubs, combat boots, surging viciously, wildly, unyieldingly, advancing with authority on regular people in street clothes and surgical masks with nothing more in their hands than flimsy poster board, or just one piece of a cardboard box.

It’s hard to have a conversation about it; there is so much information, so many images, so many stories, it's impossible to take it all in, to say to another person, did you see this one thing? I haven’t had an honest conversation with any of my in-law family (save the one college-educated nephew) since Trump was elected. They all voted for that man. I don’t know them, I realized. They don’t know me.

I told my sister I had never imagined it would look like this - protesting for civil rights, for women’s rights (which are still deemed two separate issues, because the same issue manifests in wildly different abuses). I hadn’t realized that women had had to fight their own husbands, that not even their intimate partners and family members - husbands, fathers, sons - were with them. My husband’s “tolerance” for listening to my “politics” is very, very narrow.

So I will go to my aunt’s on Thursday so I can look another human in the eye and talk about the distress, horror and fury I feel at seeing this violence and malice right before my eyes, my rage at being appalled and yet not at all surprised, and feel, for a moment, not alone.

10 June
Do you imagine in MLK’s day you would’ve seen him as an admirable and peaceful leader?

18 June
Trump is coming HERE. I have been so busy reacting I have no time to write. How do I make an impact? Writing here so maybe something will change in 100 years?
I saw Diamond Reynolds sit in that car while her 8-year-old daughter watched from the backseat. Gunshots are loud. I watched a white girl cry once just from the sound, and she was safely standing next to her brother and had pulled the trigger herself, just to see what firing a gun was like.

How could I have been so blind for so long? A liberal, proud, doggedly fair-minded Booker T Washington graduate with a high IQ and a college degree? I knew as soon as I saw what I had been missing that I could not expect POC to educate me, because I know as a rape survivor that the people experiencing the degradation are literally fighting to survive the pain of it. It takes everything for me to process the pervasiveness of America’s ongoing, unimpugned sexual assault and subjugation, and as difficult as that is, I know as a mother that it still pales in comparison to the terror women must feel from the day their sons are big enough for Americans to see them as a “scary black man.”

If you don’t know - as in can’t name and explain - how America’s cultural racism has affected your personal thinking, you’re still in it.

Juneteenth
I will not sit idly by while the traumatized do our nation’s work for us. I love you H-----.

Because every mother’s son is the most important thing. ....

I went to protest Trump’s existence, his presidency, his presence in my city. I saw the footage before I left, rage-filled men screaming, threatening, tearing around the edges of violence. So many men, just looking for an excuse. It was a real danger I felt, a real danger I was in. I went alone, after an hour-long argument with my husband. I wrote in Sharpie on my skin, I love you H-----, and my husband’s phone number. I had been downtown the day before and seen the confederate flag-waving circus, felt the energy of entitled men spoiling for a fight, saw the news that Trump told his mob the curfew had been lifted and to go have fun. I saw a corpulent white Southern woman yelling and pointing her finger at a homeless black man she followed down the street while he tried fruitlessly to escape her words.

I was truly afraid. It was very different from the women’s marches and the immigration protests. I knew I could get caught in a fight. I had seen the police presence where there had been none at other protests. There were no counter-protestors at any protest I had been to before. Now, I was the counter-protester.

I wore headphones and listened to Sam Cooke so I wouldn’t be drawn into a confrontation with any random man twice my size who knew he could beat me with impunity. I parked on the side of the tracks I belong on and walked to the other side. I passed back the blue flags. Cars with plates from every state in the south. So many amped up white men, and so many of the white women who appease them. I found my place, with like-minded strangers who couldn’t sit home with their outrage and fury. I marched. I chanted. I found a voice I didn’t know I had. I learned to stay with the group and to keep moving. I stood opposite a line of men in riot gear and looked them in the eye, and knew there was no “we”, only “us” and “them.” Would they hit me, I wondered, if someone in my vicinity got violent? A 110 lb, 5 ft tall white woman? Was I a threat here, because of who I was standing next to? Or was I fair game now, because of who I was standing next to?

I could not stay home and drink my Starbucks while people who fear for the safety of their children beg alone in the streets for something better. I could not let America and the world believe that no one here cares enough to leave the comfort and safety of their homes to speak out. I could not write myself into history as one of the ever-present majority who stood idly & silently by as Native people were marched to death, as babies were stolen from their mothers, as humans were sold like animals, as men were lynched, as women are raped with impunity and POC are killed without consequence. I am glad at least to know who I am.

6 July
I am at turns confounded, defeated, and infuriated by the standard that one cannot expect to be listened to if one is furious, screaming, and outraged; but also that one is not to be believed that the ills one has suffered are truly horrific if one can manage to speak calmly and deferentially about them.

It can’t possibly be as bad as you’re saying or you would be freaking out. If you’re freaking out, what you’re saying can’t possibly be reliable.

8 July
A creepy man followed me down the bike path today. He looked like a tweaker - a meth-head - skinny, wiry, boney; with ill-fitting clothes, a burr haircut, and plastic flip flops.
There were two of them stopped on the wooded path, after 8pm. They were standing in the left lane, doing who can guess what, until they spotted me. The skinny guy moved into my lane; not enough to block the path entirely, but enough to feel in the way.

“How you doing?” he called as I went by.
I didn’t slow down, didn’t smile, didn’t make eye contact. I answered tersely.
“Aight. You?” and kept going.
After I passed, I kicked it up a notch and pedaled faster. As fast as I could, actually, wanting to put distance behind me before he could find an excuse for conversation. I pedalled to the next gate, where I had seen someone turn in, feeling myself a good distance ahead, thinking an out of shape tweaker wouldn’t be interested in travelling so far so fast to even try to catch up. I let off pedaling to catch my breath. And there he was, so close behind he had to swerve past to keep from colliding into me. I hadn’t heard him at all.

Silent. Silently he had turned his bike around, climbed onto it, and still pedaled fast enough to catch me, without a sound.

He didn’t say a word as he went by, but he slowed down. He slowed down so much that even though I had hit my brakes into a near stop, he was no more than three bike lengths ahead of me. I had wanted to ride to the bridge just ahead, past the bend, but I had calculated, in the quick habit American women don’t even realize we have, If I go, would he go past? Would he stop and try to chat me up? Would I be allowed to turn back?

Is this a flag I will heed since I am trying to recover from trauma, instead of a flag I will respond to with my trauma by telling myself I’m just overly suspicious, or a silly woman, or I have a right to be here?

So I turned around, without hesitation, without checking if I had room, or if the drop off the side was too steep for me to recover if I didn’t. As I turned, he pretended to just be casually riding along, just to have slowed for...what? I pretended I’d reached the end of my trip and set to go back.

I pedaled fast. And passed his...friend? buddy? cohort? Coming up from what would have been behind me, had I not turned around.

Maybe I could have finished my ride unmolested. Maybe those men could have beaten and raped me there by the bridge as the sun set and my 12 year old called an unanswered phone wondering why I wasn’t home yet. Maybe I could have picked myself up and cycled myself home afterwards, or maybe they could’ve left me dead. I’ll never know. What I do know is this: there would have been no Liam Neeson, no Dirty Harry, no thin blue line. No arrest. No prosecution. No justice.

I am not equally as free as a white man to move about at my liberty; saying otherwise is the Great American Lie. Sometimes I wonder how much men expect women to endure of this culture before we decide it isn’t worth living in. I always remember though, with despair, that there are plenty more warm female bodies for the taking. Because who is going to stop them? Certainly not anyone who can.

July 18
I’m scared. School districts are releasing plans for the fall, a potpourri of do-it-yourself inconsistencies. Owasso is offering virtual or in-person, no option to change your choice; no temperature checks, masks not required. Tulsa has expanded their virtual option, previously available used mainly by kids on the verge of drop-out; or, in-class masks required, social distancing, Wednesday online, late start, extra days off. Sperry is offering virtual, in-person,or some kind of hybrid, no word on masks or covid protocols.

Our Oklahoma mortgage broker governor has Covid. So does my hairdresser, whom I haven’t seen since September, and one of my husband’s nearby co-workers.

My son had trouble breathing the other day. He had a fever of 102. He also had a sunburn. I checked in with him every hour. How is your breathing feeling now? -Same. -Same. -About the same. - Maybe a little better.

He fell asleep and got so hot I decided to call the doctor the next day.
A.M.: How’s your breathing? -Mostly normal. No more fever. Should I get him tested? Nurse: No.
Maybe he had it. Probably he didn’t. Maybe he has it now. He and S---- are both asleep.

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon; he ate breakfast at 9am, went back to bed.
My throat has been sore for 3 days.
I fear his asthma. I fear the example America is setting, denying science. I fear my son starting school. Maybe only a small percentage are hospitalized. Put on ventilators. Develop inflammatory syndrome and organ failure. Die alone, their last moments viewed on Facetime or Zoom by loved ones sitting...where? On their living room sofas? Propped up on their beds at home? I can imagine well enough; I don’t want to know what it’s like to touch the red “leave meeting” box or “end call” circle and look around the room of my familiar things and be alone, as in, without that person I loved who just died over a video connection. Your so-and-so is gone, and nothing in the room has changed.

“What is the most important thing to look out for?” I ask H----- often, the first time when he started using the lawn mower. YOU are, H-----.

139,000 dead, so far. Six months.
Vietnam: 58k. WWI: 116k. WWII: 405K. It took years.
Probably the three of us are safe.
My aunt is at the casino with her husband, who was in the hospital last month with heart issues; an obese, diabetic smoker with kidney disease. Both over 65.
Is it so hard for us to live our lives in our own space, entertaining ourselves, enjoying our own company?
My fear for others and of others disturbs me. The local bar parking lot is packed every night. Shall I expose my child, and therefore myself, to their children, and therefore them? What will the price be if I say no? We failed to create a good routine when school was online in the spring. He was angry and sullen. I was disappointed and impatient.

Then again, what are the pros? No 6:45am alarms. No American 7th grader socialization. A curriculum I can supplement.

S---- is still going to work. I’m grateful he has his job. I worry about the people he is exposed to. A guy from another shop came into his area last week and said there’s no vaccine, just let everyone get it and let the people who are going to die, die, and move on.

Does that guy have kids? Will they be in school? Will they be those kids, the ones who never wash their hands, who make a “joke” of coughing on the people next to them or sneezing on high-touch surfaces?

Will the school prohibit locker usage because they can’t socially distance? Will they have prescribed hand-washing times? How will they prevent bathroom crowding? Hand sanitizer instead, on the way in and out of classrooms? Will they keep kids together, in the same room, rotating teachers instead? Will they lunch there? What about PE? Do the classrooms have space to keep kids six feet apart? I know they don’t.

24 July
The US president is sending federal forces to occupy the states of his political opponents, and those forces are attacking Americans protesting police brutality against the black community.

I’ve seen photos of gutters running pepto-bismol pink with pepper spray residue; a 52 year old history professor with a bloody head wound inflicted by authorities; video of a 53 year old Navy veteran standing unmovable like the trunk of a tree while federal police mercilessly beat him with batons, crushing the bones in his hand.

Oklahomans are all over social media posting comments about “preserving their heritage” and not “erasing history,” lobbying rabidly to honor the flag and men of the Confederacy, a violent, racist, militia that waged war against the US.

I want these people excluded from power. I want racism and misogyny to be named for the crimes they are, and for perpetrators to be held to account. I want the use of gender and racial slurs to be an immediately fireable offense. A free and fair society does not tolerate the willful degradation of its citizens.

25 July
Today, S---- took H----- out of the living room where he was watching TV and I was reading. To be honest, he snuck him out. He must have motioned to him behind my back, I guess. I had thought they were playing in the bedroom.

H----- came out alone, later, and touched my head, asked me what I was doing. That was his lead-in. It was obvious I was reading.

-What are YOU doing, I asked.
-Well, getting ready to go to Walmart with Dad, I guess.
Raised eyebrows. He talked you into that, did he?
H----- hates shopping. He’s never eager to leave the house for chores.
-Well, he said, Please, please please will you go with me?
Our county’s positivity rate is in the red this week: 124 cases per 100k. And my husband is guilting our 12 year old asthmatic son into the Owasso superstore where rednecks are asserting their freedom to spread disease in public.

When I shop, H----- waits in the car. Sometimes I go shop when I don’t want to shop just to keep S---- from unnecessarily taking H----- into places. S---- is careless. When I share information with him, he feigns attention. Sometimes, he’ll ask me about things I told him the day before. Other times, he comes home from work and repeats things his coworkers told him as if it were news, with no awareness that he’s repeating things I’ve already told him. The latter is worse, because that’s how I know it isn’t the information he isn’t interested in listening to, it’s me.

So, he knows the current situation. He knows Tulsa filled their last ICU bed today; he knows our cases are rising; he knows Oklahomans are ready to “let whoever is going to die, die.” I have told him repeatedly I want to stay in as much as possible, whether he’s heard me or not.

If he were oblivious, he wouldn’t have snuck H----- into the other room to manipulate him into going with him.

So what do I do? Fight him over it? EVERY time? Because I’ve already challenged him, repeatedly. Last weekend, they insisted we eat inside the restaurant for pizza. The whole world is wearing masks in public, but not Redneck America. And people here are so heavily and easily influenced by what the people in their immediate vicinity are doing.

Even my Trump-hating aunt who talks about how absurdly the US has handled this is sitting in a casino multiple times a week - the one casino without a mask mandate, because my high-risk uncle wants to be able to smoke while gambling.

US: 4% of world’s population; 25% of world’s covid deaths

I will never, ever be able to forgive the people who put that man in charge of managing our government.

We are literally the only people on earth behaving this way. Fuuuuhhk yeew. I’’l slap yer ass if Ah whant tew. I’ll call him n***er if Ah whant tew. Cops can shewt hem in tha back if thay whant tew. It’s a FREE CUNTRY, AINT IT?

Freedom is not exercising total disregard for the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the other people in your community.

27 July
“You can’t be afraid to live your life,” the Trump supporters taunt.
A deliberate mischaracterization of other people’s concerns for others as fear - a diversion from their own selfishness in refusing to be mildly inconvenienced, even if it could save another person’s life.

The more we stay home and away from other people, the fewer people die. The US death toll is over 146,000 people today.

15 August
I am important. My well-being matters to what I can offer the world, including H-----. My feelings are essential to that. Acknowledging them, awareness of how I feel, and adjusting to care for them, to ease my suffering, to do whatever is necessary to relieve my pain - curling up in a corner, covering up with a blanket, releasing myself from others to be alone and safe, warming my feet, cooling my brow, eating, quenching my thirst - adjusting whatever I need to make myself comfortable is essential to what I can offer the world.

23 August
Two and a half weeks of “distance” learning; distanced from school, no longer distanced from home. No after-school work. No travel to and fro. No hours for electives or time for “getting ready” to present oneself to others. No lunch-packing or clothes-readying. H----- still has time to himself at the end of the day, time not managed by dictating adults.

And I have taken time to watch the first star emerge, the first tree to leaf in the spring, the first frog to call near Beltane, the first fireflies to arise in the dark.

September
Today I realized that the way I have been put down (dumb cunt, worthless whore, selfish bitch) affects my thinking. I haven’t contacted H-----’s school about the problems we’re experiencing because I expect to be treated as a problematic, bossy, complainer who thinks too highly of myself/my kid. I hear those voices over again in times of conflict, in times when I have to challenge a man rather than appease his ego. My learned experience is that telling a man something he doesn’t want to hear is dangerous.

15 September

If a man were not yet a tyrant, but were just a man...but a man who hoped to become a tyrant, quietly, without telling you so, how would Trump supporters be able to tell? How would they know if they were helping him? If a man wanted to take over our country the way Putin took over Russia, how would they be able to tell?

I can tell. It’s way past clear. I, and many people, were concerned before the 2016 election. I talked about it - to people who would listen.

Some people would not believe it even if the man himself said it and then took it back.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he said.

I always thought that if I’d lived through the Civil War as a Southerner or through Hitler’s reign as a German that I would've been able to understand the thinking of the supporters.

I was wrong.

I was taught in school (directly or indirectly, I don’t know) that “people thought differently then,” that “times were different.” I was taught that as though it were an explanation, as though I would’ve been with them had I been there.

I would not have.

I would not have made economic excuses for the enslavement of my fellow humans. I would not have confused people for animals. I would not have been oblivious to the pained eyes of a mother watching, powerless, as her child was taken away and sold like an object. THAT is not my being, in this age nor any other. I would not have lacked human empathy.

18 September
We never talk about how we got here. About how it’s a social norm for girls to be raped and never mention it to another soul for thirty years. .....

Hail Goddess, full of Grace
The world is in the Thee
Blessed art Thou among women, And blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, All of us.

Holy Mother, Giver of Life, Rise up in us now,
In the hour of our need.

23 September
What are people willing to do if it could save someone else’s life? Run into a burning building? Perform CPR? Open your home to a stranger in a tornado? Wear a mask over your nose and mouth in the grocery store?

14 October
Revile. That’s the word thumping unceasingly in my mind. I revile that man. His supporters. Everything he has done and all that they stand for. Grotesque, in a sense Vincent Price & Edgar Allan Poe would understand, only more than can be conceived in imagination. Sometimes I confusedly think life is like this, this day-to-day worry, because of the pandemic. And I see that the pandemic had to be. But it didn’t have to be like this.

Comprehending the nature of this pandemic is one thing, but comprehending it with that man in power is a different sphere of insanity.

Farm trucks drive by daily here, in this godforsaken place of Christian man-worshippers, with flags as big as bedsheets fluttering madly from posts erected in their pick-up beds. 210,000 Americans are dead. Trump 2020, they pronounce. KEEP AMERICA GREAT. No more bullshit their flags threaten. The words, needs, ideas of anyone not like them dismissed, squashed, silenced simply by calling bullshit. Crass. Classless? No. Theirs is quite a class, of the worst kind. The bigots. The small-minded. The cruel. The easily manipulated yet still bold and vicious. No masks for them. Rebels and “free-thinkers” of the type who say fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do and spit while they look you in the eye. Freedom to them means not doing what they’re told, no matter what that may be: speak for equality? Look at the facts? Cover your mouth to save a life? Just being asked, given a recommendation, without recourse or enforcement, is too much for them to tolerate.
....

I can’t talk about Ruth. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who kept her name, quite likely the greatest hero women have had in man-authored history. They’re trying to make us go back to being forced to have children. The election may not even be enough to save us from that. There is no greater control abusive men have over women than impregnation by claiming “I’ll pull out,” or flat out rape. Forced pregnancy deprives us of the ability to make decisions solely for our own well-being and survival. “Fuck you don’t tell me what to do,” doesn’t apply to us. Put us in jail for electing not to grow a seed into a person? Four years ago, some people believed even asking the question was outrageous.

I’m ready for radical change, of the basic human dignity and equality variety. Of the generation of women who brought us birth control, the right to vote, child labor and welfare laws; stories that are silently overlooked. We teach a history of warfare, absent of social justice.

And the pandemic rages on. Only it is the Trump loyalists who are raging, with all the bravado of beer-guzzling rednecks with pot-bellies and scruffy faces, yelling and tearing ass through town, the thought of anyone chastising them an entertaining dare. They rail fearlessly; not because they are not cowards, but because they live in a world where they have nothing to fear. The only thing they are in danger of is losing supremacy over others. Grown white men, with assault rifles, loaded. A smile and a nod from uniformed officers. We all know who is “us” and who is “them.”

I miss the city. The downtown skyline. Yoga in the park. The glass balcony rooms & modern furniture of the Central Library. I miss seeing real, tangible, other-than-this rural-minded community, where they teach the pre-K to chant “you git what you git and you don’t throw a fit,” where women just don’t talk about their bible’s edict that “wives submit.” These are not my people. This is not my tribe. I don’t belong here, and I don’t want to.

Our divide is not people with long hair, make-up, and high heels vs. rugged boots, plaid shirts, and denim. It is between those who have bodies that can create people and those who have bodies large enough to dominate them.

16 October 2020
Halloween? The baseball stadium is selling tickets, masks required, trick or treating on the outdoor concourse, movie on the jumbo screen, socially distanced. I bought tickets. The next day, the health department published “suggestions” to “consider.” No trick or treating, no large groups, even outdoors. I’d be happy dressing up, carving pumpkins, making caramel apples at home. But I’m not 12.

My days are still not my own. School at home eats six hours of our day, sometimes more. The Sperry middle school principal prohibited relegating any teachers specifically to distance-learners, in stark contrast to the early childhood, elementary, intermediate and high school. The math teacher is either resentful or incompetent, maybe both.

19 October
Risk assessment is a mind-scramble. The wild array of experiences with the same illness. No way of guessing what to expect could happen to you personally. Thousands of dollars in hospital bills? Permanent lung and heart damage, no longer able to cycle, swim, do the construction work necessary for our business to survive? Or no symptoms and not even know I had it? Or sick in bed for weeks, miserable, living in fear of every used tissue and shared space spreading illness to my child with asthma? Would he wheeze and turn blue and have to go to the hospital like when he was a toddler? If I let his friend come over to play, will that happen to him? If I don’t, will he become an isolated loner & lose his sense of identity and independence?

I said no to basketball. His entire team that he has played with for 4 years is playing without him. The school doesn’t require masks in the classrooms unless the teachers request it. One teacher, alone, who has told me how much she’s been attacked for it. Nobody has teachers’ backs; they’re on their own. We all are, I guess. Defend yourself - against violent, misogynist, bigots who find reality TV and pro-wrestling inspirational.

At my sister’s home in northern Virginia, my niece’s soccer team gets temp checks at the gate, and spectators are limited to parents only and are required to wear masks and stay distant. And they are all doing online school; they aren’t even in classrooms.

H-----’s basketball team? Exposed to 100 other 7th graders every day, no masks, running & panting together in gym class, no testing, hosting multi-county ball games with busloads of people crowding into the stands. So, no basketball for my 12 year old. Interaction with friends limited to video games so far this school year, except those 2 days I felt safe enough (cavalier enough? desperate or sad or guilty or risky enough?) to let him have a friend over.

My aunt canceled Thanksgiving at her house. Probably for good. I’m sad. My sister-in-law will probably host 30 people at her place, including my nephew back from college, my niece who refuses to wear a mask at school because “it doesn’t make a difference,”; her mother-in-law and alcoholic boyfriend. If Trump wins, I’m not going. 2016 was horrible. S---- attacked me in the car on the way there for daring to challenge his referring to all Hispanic people as Mexican.

Thanksgiving seems so far away. There will be an election first. Will our country be in chaos those three weeks between Election Day and Thanksgiving? Will we have results from all states, all ballots counted? Will ballots delayed by postal failure be discounted? Will the world watch on edge as courts decide which ballots count and which don’t? Will it be decided by a Supreme Court picked largely and in the ninth hour by the incumbent who lost the popular vote? Will the Proud Boys and Boogaloo and other ragtag groups of angry entitled white men spoiling for a fight be shooting more protesters in the street? Will the police - what? What will they do? Beat and arrest mothers, teachers, doctors, college kids, accountants, store clerks and managers because they were nearby when a young violent man threw a bottle or a rock, or started a fire or broke glass, as they have been doing?

Thanksgiving is far away. This week, I have an appointment to see if I have skin cancer. I have a 2-day job an hour from home, doing exhausting, all-day work that makes my fingers ache and my temper short, and somehow I have to homeschool H----- on every one of those days. Thursday is my therapy appointment; EMDR trauma counseling. I can’t work, teach school, and be in rape therapy all at the same time on Thursday. I’m already taking H----- with me to wait in the car Tuesday at the dermatologist, who isn’t allowing people to wait inside.

He doesn’t feel safe at home by himself anymore, probably because he just doesn’t feel safe much at all anymore. All his friends are living a different life. For what it’s worth, H----- believes the science.

S---- has a dentist appointment scheduled for the same time as my dermatology appointment. And - ffs, literally - he has been put on call for jury duty until November 6th.

This time last year, we were playing catch in Jackson Square park in the French Quarter.

I had horrible cramps and headaches all weekend. Are we adding menopause to the mix? While I try to figure out how to warn my son off porn before he discovers it while also making him feel safe about his imminent experiences with wet-dreams, masturbation, and surprise erections? I certainly can’t leave it up to his father; he would undoubtedly reinforce our cultural habit of initiating adolescent boys into the club of normalizing subjugation through sexual objectification.

27 October
They confirmed a man-pleaser to the Supreme Court today to replace Ginsburg. I can’t talk about Amy. I want to put a gun to my head when I think about it. I see people in such racist conditions in the rural south or squalid conditions of poverty in my own community and wonder why they stay, how they stand it.

Today, I wonder why I stay alive in a world that treats the creators of life like sex slaves. I want to set myself on fire on the courthouse steps; my love for my child is what stops me. I don’t want to live in this hell. Dystopia. We imagine we wouldn’t tolerate dystopia when we fictionalize it, as if we could be steeped and indoctrinated in it and still be aware of missing something we’ve never had. Men control women through our children. Without children, we wouldn’t be so beholdened to them. I want to tell them all, a whole generation of girls, don’t do it. Don’t have kids. Live for you. Make strides for equality for the next generation...by foregoing the human bond that enables you to endure the most heinous abuse, from preachers, husbands, employers, school officials, or family members for the sake of your children. Abrahamic religions have turned the greatest gift into the greatest curse.

Inhale.

I cannot control other people. I cannot control the weather or our government. I cannot control H-----’s teachers or school district.

BECAUSE I am an American woman, I cannot control what is done to or goes on inside my own physical body. I can be and have been forced to feel things that have made me wish I were dead.

They say we are equal. The founding fathers invented gaslighting.

28 October
Following organized religion to find enlightenment is like cheating off a C student’s paper to practice medicine.

29 October
One hour and five minutes to vote, while H----- waited in the car. First day of early voting.

Most people wore masks. Some stayed back from each other, others didn’t. I saw more than a dozen Black women; that’s probably more than I’ve seen combined in 10 years in Skiatook.

Home-schooling is so much harder than it should be. The teacher-less online program Sperry is using is horrible. It’s full of errors, mistakes, and outright racist ideology. Today the recorded lecture claimed America had a civil war because “so many people were angry Lincoln won the election.” No mention of slavery or equality.

3 November
I’m terrified. I should've made a plan to connect with people I can trust. I told myself I

was ok, that I would be ok. I realize now I just wasn’t facing how hard this would be. I told myself it would be a while before we get the results. But they’re predicting states. They’re going to predict a winner tonight. I don’t know that I can survive it if Trump wins.

I wonder if my neighbors voted for him this time, even after their daughter committed suicide. Delayed death by rape. It’s a long, slow, painful way to go. I don’t know that I have the strength to keep resisting. I suppose Trump’s kind would call that weak. But then, they’ve never really had to endure much of anything, so what do they really know? Privilege. Power. Entitlement.
.....

It doesn’t really matter who’s had it worse than me if I can’t stand the pain.

I don’t know what stopped black women from taking their own lives to escape when white men stole their children away to lives of cruelty. Obama calls for hope, but I’m having trouble finding it.

For S----, the pain isn’t real because it isn’t his pain. He refuses to see the suffering of the people right in front of him. His own wife. He turns a blind eye even on H-----’s emotional

distress. He just wants him to stop crying and smile; he demands it. What am I supposed to do with a world like this?

He can’t comprehend why abortion rights matter to a woman who isn’t pregnant. He is incapable of empathizing with what it feels like to live in a society where you are so controlled by others, so at the mercy of people who believe it is their god-given right that you submit to their control over what happens to your body.

Their freedom to whatever they wish extends so far beyond their physical space that they get enraged when someone else’s vehicle gets within 15 feet of the back of theirs.

-What I can control ends with me, some people say. For me, what I can control doesn’t even start there. That is my lived experience.

4 November
I haven’t looked yet. I’m literally too afraid. I know he won Oklahoma by the same margin as last year, and I saw a map that showed it wasn’t going to be a landslide. So I don’t know about the Senate either. I don’t want to find out by accident. But I also don’t want to look before I teach H----- through school today because I don’t know how I can get through it without his seeing my distress if this regime is going to stand.

7 November
Yesterday, my 12 year old fought through tears, visibly struggling to hold in his pent-up anxiety as he talked to me about his friend coming over for an outdoor visit in a few hours. “When Devin comes over, could you like, not...I don’t want him to know...I don’t like to talk to him about Trump. Like he hasn’t said it to me, but sometimes I hear him talk to other people I can’t hear because they’re on Playstation. He says, ‘you better not be a Biden supporter,’ I’m scared he won’t be my friend anymore.”

“You can be you,” I told him. “You are a cool person and a good friend,” I told him. “That is why Devin likes you, not because of Biden or Trump. I wouldn’t bring up politics with your friends, but I won’t act like someone I'm not, either....”

I said a lot. None of it felt right. And none of it could be “your friend wouldn’t personally attack you for not being a Trump supporter,” because personal attacks for refusal to agree is the example Trump supporters elevated for themselves and their children to follow.

CNN called the election this morning for Biden.
Don Jr. was on Twitter this week calling for Trump's campaign to “wage total war.” When we read the stories of the past, however narrowed by racism & sexism they may be, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t empathize with what it’s like to be unable to see the outcome.

14 November
Choosing to speak up is the catalyst to transforming energy.

We’ve been conditioned to believe our words have no power because our bodies can’t force compliance with our wishes, but our words do have power, farther reaching and longer lasting than we can ever know.

November
I’m not going to go to Thanksgiving with S—’s family if they do it. There are no limits with them, no boundaries for their safety or anyone else’s. And what do I do about H-----? Do I decide? Lay down the law? Tell my husband he’s not allowed to take him, whether he wants to go or not? Have that fight in front of H-----, because we’re never not together, or have it while he sleeps? And if I’m the bad guy, denying my son his cousins and his holiday while his dad goes anyway, his dad will go anyway. He will not wear a mask. He will not keep his distance.

There will be that moment, when S— goes to the car and we stay in the house, when S— looks at H----- and H----- at S—, the 12 year old “it’s not fair eyes” meeting the “I’m sorry your mom did this” look. All so S— can expose himself to every one of two dozen people at that gathering and bring home anything he gets to us.

Do I say I’m not going because it’s the responsible thing to do? My own family gathering was cancelled a month ago. I’m not going. I don’t think you guys should go either. But make your own choice. H-----, choose, between your mom and your dad?

If his family weren’t Trump supporters, they wouldn’t be doing this. They’d be following the advice of medical experts.

X November
Astounded. I was astounded when my Trump-hating cousin passionately and emotionally insisted on election night that our election process can’t possibly be legit. The thing is, I challenged her reasoning. What reasons do you have? And are you going to continue defending that POV even after admitting you have no reasons?

Later my aunt was almost apologetic on my cousin’s behalf.
“She doesn’t watch the news. She didn’t even realize that was a Trump thing.”
THAT is what was so disturbing about it to me; the cultural osmosis, to be so influenced, to be that adamant. She hung up on me, for the first time in our lives, and we haven’t spoken since.

24 November
“I do what the fuck I want,” isn’t freedom, it’s anarchy.

11 December
“Intimate” violence. The safest kind for perpetrators. Violence that can be committed freely, fearlessly, without concern of reprisal or consequence.
Imagine that man you’ve seen, maybe at work, or in your extended family, at the ball game; that guy you’ve seen that seemed really scary when he was angry, maybe one of the men in images of white supremacist rallies or state capitol protests. And imagine what he would’ve done if no one had been watching, if no one had been there to possibly stop him, if there were no chance of him being seen by someone else, no fear of legal or financial liability, and he outsized the object of his anger by more than three weight classes. Angry men are never more free to be violent than when they have a woman at home who has confused trauma for love.

19 December
The bible confuses people into thinking human culture didn’t exist before Judaism. Humans had food, clothing, shelter, work, religion for hundreds of thousands of years

before the bible existed. For hundreds of thousands of years, every human could see with their own eyes that women created people inside their bodies. What crimes against humanity did man have to commit to create and perpetuate a culture that convinces people that life was created by a man-god in the sky and that women are “weaker vessels” brought into existence to serve as “helpmeets'' to men?

24 December
H----- couldn’t sleep last night. I sat up talking to him. At 3am, he asked if we would have to get vaccines.
- Like, by law, you mean? No.
- Dad said you don’t know what could happen after you take it. That I could get lung cancer in five years.

Of course, S— hasn’t told H----- about the documented long-term effects Covid has on some people. He hasn’t told him that going into Bath & Body Works to Xmas shop put him at significantly greater risk than taking a vetted and approved vaccine. S— isn’t conscious of the fact that at this age, H----- sees his parents as the reliable authority on everything that isn’t video games.

1 January 2021
Winter is for self-reflection, meditation, turning inward, burrowing into the solace and warmth of one’s own being, like a seed nestled in the warmth of the Earth. My pine tree stands like a sentinel outside my front door, a reminder that the vibrant green leaves of spring and summer will return, are cycling also, are “up gathered now like sleeping flowers.” I stopped suffering from seasonal depression when I started observing the solstice, looking forward to celebrating the passage of the longest night, with gratitude for the warmth of a Yule fire and ritual bath.

21 January
So many men believe women must provoke our attackers into beating us while they’re raping us if we want a chance at justice for being raped.

5 April

“I’m the girl who...” was glad to be rid of people during the pandemic. I recoil now from people I tolerated, like oil shrinking from water. I realize many of the people I have allowed in my life “put me from my suit.” They are distractions, and I have found a sincere desire to remove distractions.

There are people I have known a lifetime that I’ve been shocked to discover are truly compassionless. There are people in my life who are just “ok”; they take my energy; they distract me from myself. I don’t want to go back to setting myself aside to politely gift my attention to anyone who walks into my path just because they are “nice enough.”

I like to write. I haven’t done it more because I often tell myself I have nothing of value to say. Pointless drivel. Ranting. Raging. Self-indulgent crap. Nothing important.

But it is. It is important. I fervently wish for a look inside the private-diary minds of just-average women throughout human history, a look at how our cultural thinking has evolved.

I haven’t named or even recognized how and what has changed over the last year, but I know I don’t want to go back. People have shown themselves for who they are. In a crisis, it’s the Christian evangelicals who refused to cover their mouths in public to save the lives of thousands. It’s the Christian evangelicals who bare feral snarls at desperate children who weren’t born on the right side of the river.

I don’t want to spend holidays with in-laws and their judgements and their silence on all that matters. I don’t want to take my energy from myself.

I have been so much less concerned with how other people judge me because I have exposed myself to so few people. There is no imagining how this encounter or that will play out, because I have had so few planned encounters.

6 April
Already I’m pressuring myself to resume performing my gender. It’s exhausting even thinking about how time-consuming it is, and I’m resentful.
When will I work in 2 and a half hours and $200 to color my graying hair? Most likely it

will take precedence over my mammogram and dental hygiene. I’m criticizing my toenails.

For the third day in a row, I’ve scolded myself for not knuckling down and ripping the tiny hairs off my upper lip.

Shave your legs, shave your legs, shave your legs.

How much would I have to spend and how long would it take to find cosmetics that would better hide the age of my face?

And, oh god, I’ll need my summer body back to not feel ashamed while swimming.

1 July
In the interest of what a judge considers “fundamental fairness,” Bill Cosby, admitted serial rapist, was released today, his jury conviction overturned by men, in a manner preventing any possibility of retrial.

I am scheduled to be celebrating my freedom today.

20 July
Olympic athletes are being forced to compete wearing, essentially, their underwear. Not the men, just the women. They are required to wear bikini bottoms that literally bare their ass cheeks. A Norwegian team took a fine in protest; $177 each, to wear shorts the same length as the men’s uniforms.

Never look back on this period of our history and believe women were all acclimated. We aren’t. We - some of us - are vibrantly, painfully aware of our roles as living sex dolls for men.

My sister told me the story today of my niece’s first “summer activity day” at elementary school, years ago, pre-pandemic, and her level of anxiety and discomfort. My sister talked about how awful it was, and used the term “body issues.”

The boys wore their suits to school, because “boy” suits are suitable for public forums; shorts & t-shirts. The girls, though, had to change at school. They had to go into a separate place in a public building and strip. At school. If this seems like no big deal, try it at your job. Perhaps in a public restroom stall with a dirty floor. Take off all your clothes, put them down somewhere in that restroom stall with no toilet lid or shelf or hooks, feel the office air on your bare skin, maybe put on a pair of bottoms that are cut as high in the legs as girl-children’s swimsuits, and just imagine displaying yourself to your co-workers.

So the one group of kids strips out of their everyday clothes that are suitable in public spaces and puts on instead “girl-suits” that expose the curve of their behinds to the view of their classmates, teachers and friends. And then we tell them if they are uncomfortable, it is because they have “body issues.”

22 July
Deaths: 609,508

In two weeks, covid cases have tripled again. I wonder if history will reflect Americans’ disregard for the safety and trauma of this experience on healthcare workers the same way history looks on our treatment of returning combat veterans from Vietnam.

What motivated the vaccine-hesitant is going to be a question asked for generation upon generation. It is a failing of humanity than in all our study of the Holocaust, we have never adequately addressed how people came to do that. We have preferred instead to vilify only one man as evil incarnate.

One fanatic, without followers, is nothing more than a lunatic on a street corner.

“They’ve made their choice; let them die with it” is not an uncommon social media sentiment. Survival of the fittest, etc.

Trump supporters do not know how to balance information. Facebook memes and guidance from specialists with decades of relevant experience are just two competing pieces of information. They lack critical thinking skills, an assertion I made to my nephew in 2016, when he was staggered by the voting differences between those with college degrees and those without.

I read a story today of a man who mocked covid. He got it; he recovered easily. His fiancee got it and turned blue. Instead of taking her to the hospital, he borrowed an oxygen sensor from his neighbor. Her O2 level was 48. He knew that meant death’s door, so he decided

the sensor was wrong. He checked four more times before taking her to the hospital. She was in a coma for weeks, but she lived. He said when he was looking at the O2 readings, his mind went blank; he didn’t know what to do. He also said he still didn’t know if he needed to get vaccinated. “I’ve been told I do, but I’ve also been told I don’t.”

I’ve been told. As if he can’t look at the facts and decide for himself; he must be told, and he can’t decide who to listen to.

We, as a nation, have failed - refused, even - to equally educate our people. Now, we, as a nation, are paying for it. These are people so confused they literally cannot act to preserve their own lives.

23 July
Deaths (America): 610,020

This doesn’t feel anymore like a bizarre once in 100 years happening. I watched the Olympics today, and I forgot they had been postponed from a year ago. It didn’t seem odd that no one is there to watch; only infuriating that competing women had to fight for permission to keep their nursing infants with them.

I’ve started wondering if the future will look back and think how strange this all must’ve been, or will it look back and think how strange it was people ever went without masks in public, like going without shoes, an ancient, uncivilized way of living? Weeks ago, I thought I guess the pandemic is over. No more need for masks, now that my son, myself, my husband are all vaccinated. Today, I’m expecting H----- will be wearing a mask & wondering how many people I know will die. Not like-minded friends & family, vaccinated and taking precautions, but the red-state Republicans surrounding me in this godforsaken place.

A year ago, I was railing, pacing in the yard, feeling frustration, believing Trumpublicans wouldn’t come around until someone they knew died - but believing they would, eventually, see facts and reality. Now I realize many of them will die, never seeing it was a choice, that it was in their control. How many generations of Confederates’ children lived and died believing the South would rise again? When people are this passionately attached to a belief, what does it take to end it? And what do I really know anyway; the South is rising again, isn’t it?

Hospitals are filling in Missouri and Florida. How full will they get? Will people get vaccinated when they’re full again? When thousands more die by dumb choice? Will the excess of unnecessarily-dying-of-covid patients interfere with care of everyone else who would normally need hospital services? Will mammograms and MRIs and cancer testing be withheld to treat people who fell ill by choice?

Nobody is talking anymore about the number of dead - nationally, or worldwide. Six-hundred and ten-thousand Americans, and history will forever wonder why, and hearing the people who choose not to get vaccinated wouldn’t help anyone understand at all.

12 August

Since I came back from my sister’s in Virginia, in mid-July, before the resurgence, when it looked like covid was over, covid cases have returned to as high here as before the vaccine was available. We went from thinking the pandemic is over to pre-vaccine highs in 10 days.

I don’t feel safe here, in this place, around these people who can’t differentiate between fact and outlandish fiction, who believe their personal choice trumps public health.

.....
Caring for myself [...] is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. -Audre Lorde

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept. -Angela Davis

I had a right to liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other. - Harriet Tubman

Each time a woman stands up for herself without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women. - Maya Angelou

It is time for women to stop being politely angry. -Leymah Gbowee

13 September 2021
People here, in the US, are dying at a rate of 10,000 per week. Ten thousand people per week. It may as well be two for all the reaction of Oklahomans. Our contagion rates are high, our hospitalization and death rates are climbing, but anyone not looking at the media can laze about in their oblivion. Northern Idaho’s hospitals are full. A man with a head injury from a fall at his construction job has been waiting in the ER for an ICU bed for two days. Surgeries for brain tumors and orthopedic injuries are being cancelled. Small town, rinky-dink hospitals can’t send people with acute care needs to larger facilities. Hospitals there are full of anti-mask anti-vaxxers.

22 September, Mabon
2000 people a day now. 14,000 a week. Idaho hospitals are cancelling treatments for bone cancer and brain tumors because their hospitals are filled with unvaccinated covid patients. The ethics of our crisis of care standards did not account for a situation in which so many Americans willfully put their health and lives at risk they overwhelm the system.

7 October
The time of Matilda Gage was the time of Frederick Douglass. Abolition followed by suffrage, a time of progressive upheaval and the Industrial Revolution.
Roger Taney’s Supreme Court decision created a backlash that buoyed Lincoln to the White House and led to the 14th Amendment.

 20 October

I don’t protest to save others. I protest because the way things are is unacceptable to me.

22 October
Oklahoma just put a 20-year-old woman in prison because she miscarried a 16-week pregnancy. Even SNL is calling women bitch and joking about the sexual degradation of women on Pornhub. And nobody is talking about the below-the-fold story of the woman who was raped for 40 minutes on a crowded public train car in Philadelphia while the bystanders did what they have always done.

Samhain 2021
There is no amount of suffering women can endure that will be enough to move the men we know and love to action on our behalf. Equality is not a gift to be given once we have acquiesced, appeased, and pleased enough. There is no amount of prostrating that will earn equality. Appeasement is a habit that leads only to more appeasement, the chipping away, one small compromise at a time, to a regular relationship of submission.

If our religious leaders & their followers no longer believe wives should submit to husbands, why do they keep it in their religious texts?

The suffering we endure is more painful than the conflict. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable - aren’t you already? The conflict is here - we are not creating it; we have been enduring it, silently, so that those who are creating it by denying our right to equality and bodily autonomy can be comfortable with the habit of it.

1 December
Again, I am triggered by my sense of powerlessness.
How many people throughout history have fought for change not because it was their

dream, but because they couldn’t live with the pain of things staying the same? It isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity.

30 December
My mother didn’t come for Christmas. No one did. My niece tested positive for Omicron

five days ago, eight hours before their flight. My mom stayed with my sister in Virginia, shut up in a house with a person she knew to be covid positive until eventually they all had it. She had been afraid to go home to Maryland alone and discover she was sick. She’s had her booster. She’s feeling better today.