As I sit here with one week to go before my post-op appointment to find out the stage of cancer and whether they got all they needed to get, I listen to the debate and hear that man say things like "Obamacare is a disaster. Just a disaster", I want to throw up.
Amid Friday night’s Twitter conversations, author Kelly Oxford shared the story of her first sexual assault and then requested others to share theirs. By Saturday evening, more than 9.7 million women tweeted their first sexual assault tales, according to Oxford. One of these was mine.
When I was a kid I loved to run. My heart trying to pound its way free of my chest, my lungs on fire, my throat raw, legs turned to liquid, my whole body vibrating with life. On the track I was free. I was fast. I was strong. People would talk about my body, about my legs, words like “sturdy, substantial, and thick,” were often tossed around to describe my muscular thighs. I knew somewhere deep in my gut that these were bad words to describe a girl’s body. I knew girls weren’t supposed to be powerful like me.
When you are raped, you have days like today when you think about your life and who are you because of your experiences. You want to be big and bold and great, but you are tired. You want to accomplish everything and save everyone, but you are sad. You want to disappear onto an island, but you are weighed down.
I missed my son like mad. We talked by phone regularly. I flew back on holidays. He came to visit on spring break, and for a few weeks every summer. Seven years passed.
I feared my grief. It would creep out of nowhere, just when I thought I had found peace. There she would be. My own mother walking down the street in a trench coat, looking her smart, assured self. Of course it was not her. My mother was dead. But I could almost smell the perfumed blush on her soft, pink cheek. And wham, the grief would come.
Our new life here guarantees each and every day starts with a natural flow carved out between a mother and son. An overgrown boy with sleep in his eyes propels himself into my bed each morning with a declaration of, “Apple juice! Coffee!” His verbal cue for me to get out of bed and start this freshly gifted day we’ve been given together.
My eyes glanced around at the half filled yellow plastic chairs near ours to see if any of my friends or professors could hear our conversation. Was I actually on a date with a convicted felon?
My mother came to visit me at least once a year no matter where I was, because she wanted to be able to picture me in a place. She wanted to know the neighborhood, see how I’d decorated my apartment and meet my co-workers and friends.
The world was expanding and we thought it would go on forever, and ever better. A time when some of our dreams for a more civilized, humane and liberated country actually came true. We never imagined fifty years later it would all go to hell. It seemed impossible.
So you write your story even if it is the scariest way you’ve revealed insides to the world to date, so that hopefully someone out there will feel not so alone, will feel just a little bit better about their differences. Because differences are really strengths, disguised.
They will want to commiserate if you tell them this, and that is the worst. It will push you close to losing your shit. The clerk who lost someone, I despise that phrasing of death - lost - like love is book or a glove or your keys, because everything in the known world has an equal and opposite force, so, if it is lost, then at some point, I will find it, right?
