Tales of the City
I am sewing pearls for my wedding quilt. It’s the quilt I will drag along behind me like a child, and cuddle under in a future marriage. Half comfort, a testimony to my resilience and gift of healing. Half horror story. At its inception was a call for more transformation and self-awareness.
I had wanted to make a drawing of my face as the moon and all the pearls I had made out of bad experiences. The drawing that came through was not just the moon and pearls. It was the way we treat the moon in this world. It is the way we treat the divine feminine.
Moon Face with Gun sketch, c 2022
Why, as a culture are we so permissive of violence towards the feminine and vulnerable? How can we allow the murder and rape of women, children, & trans women, over and over again? How can we be filled with so much hatred towards the feminine? It’s not just men, it’s women too. It is such deep hatred. Our religious stories are filled with anger and resentment towards women. The law suppresses emotions in an attempt to see clearly, but emotions are part of a feminine and vulnerable reality. They are part of all of us. To censure and oppress emotion is the death of humanity. Let us not confuse removing passion with removing compassion.
The summer I was 16 I stayed with my grandmother in Chicago. I was doing all the ‘things’ I really wanted to be doing with my life. I was taking advanced ballet classes everyday and a pre-calculus correspondence course. I was on my way to graduating high school a year early to escape a difficult home. I wanted to still graduate on the advanced math track, so I was doing the math over the Summer. I wanted to be a doctor, and a dancer. That summer I went most places by myself. I am adventurous and independent. I walked to the beach all the time. I took the bus to class and the L around town.
Towards the end of the Summer I was assaulted by 4-5 guys. I was surrounded, and could only see four of them. They had a gun. Guns do a lot of damage that does not involve mass shootings, or even without any shooting, they immediately deliver the threat of death. They are an extremely powerful tool for getting what you want. These guys didn’t want to kill me, they just wanted their version of reality. They wanted to rage rape me. With the gun, they got what they wanted.
As I make this weighted quilt, I think of miracles I have experienced, and it keeps me going.
That summer I had been watching Tales of the City. It was airing weekly on PBS. I would wait all week for the next episode, and I didn’t get to see them all. My grandfather pretty much dominated the television but he had a health problem that made him sleep a lot. I would sneak a channel change, sitting on the floor in front of the TV. He often would wake up and growl and change it back to his program. It felt like a cartoon of a mouse running out to get some cheese with the big, mean, light-sleeping cat close by. I got to watch enough of the show to fall in love. Anna Madrigal, is one of my favorite television mothers. She is a landlady and provides a home and care for her grown child and others. Her child, Mona, thinks her father had abandoned her, but really she is right there nurturing her as her understanding landlord. I loved seeing Mona and DeDe. I loved that there was a place where everyone could just be themselves, dating men or women, or either, and being true to themselves. Seeing that show before this traumatic event was a minor miracle. It made me feel like I don’t need to be this or that, or ‘come out’. I don’t need to fit into a category, I can just be myself. The story is full of drama. But, it lacks the pain of conforming when you aren’t normal, or hating oneself because you fear your truth. My favorite thing is to hold space for and observe people coming into their authenticity.
Today I went with my daughter to a contact improvisation dance class. It was my first time, hers too! I don’t think young me would have been able to hack it, not even 35 year old me. She said she thought ‘it was kind of fun’—a win, for sure, from a 12 year old. It had been a hard day with lots of stress from a physics midterm (as I prepare to enter a doctorate program in Chinese medicine at NUNM) and plenty of other big emotional things pending. The class brought me back to my heart, and the joy I experience dancing. It felt so good to work through mental bondage that me and my daughter felt doing something so new with an entirely new group and group dynamic. It was nice to roll around with her. It felt great to get out of my physics filled head! I remembered what it was like in high school to want to be a dancer and a doctor, to have a dream. It felt so calm, clear, and light compared to how I have been feeling about my life the last several years.
My ex has been stalking me again. I have had two break-ins that seemed like him. The people who are close to me and know the situation are worried he will kill me, or us. The way our justice system errs on the side of caution protects and serves abusers rather than the vulnerable. When I worked as an RN in hospitals we used evidence-based practices. Rather than waiting for each the individual’s symptoms to become painfully obvious and risk death, we observed for warning signs that statistically portended dangerous outcomes and invested in early intervention. Where is evidence-based law? False reports of child abuse, rape, and domestic violence are grossly overestimated. By ignoring crimes that happen in the privacy of the home for lack “evidence” we are actually ignoring the larger evidence that these accusations are 90-98% true (source). This leaves victims without legal protection and open to repeated assaults, sexual crimes, and death. Mass shooters often have a history of violence against women. Let’s have the legal system start looking at the glaringly obvious evidence: national and global statistics about the treatment of women and children. Let’s have them become accountable for their own internalized misogyny and/or failure to change laws, systems, and legal practice that injure the heart of our culture.
