i obsess.

not to be read if you possess a blueprint for enjoying your life.

The thing is, I'm going through a mid-life crisis, but it's kind of precious since it's my first one of what is certain to be a regular item on the menu of my life for the next, oh, fourteen-odd years.  It's kind of sweet and darling and golden in its twirly, twirly petticoats and its first-serious-wrinkles way.  It's adorable in its holy-shit-that-old-broad-in-the-mirror-is-me kinda fashion.  The genuine taken-aback by the quasi-unrecognizable element - it's nothing short of bizarre.

I was never traditionally gorgeous.  I wasn't a looker in high school.  Allow me to qualify that statement: I was not asked out on dates.  This was possibly more a lethal-to-sexual-development combination of an older, protective brother who was a well-known senior upon my arrival as a freshman, who most likely warned everyone of ugly mishaps if they so much as dared to turn their head while I bounced in blissful unawareness down a locker-filled hallway, and my being a gigantic fucking nerd.  I wasn't nerdy in dress, but I was nerdy in reputation, having been a member of the TAG (talented and gifted) program for all of grade school, etc., bla-dee-blowhard-blah.  I got academic awards and achieved - uh, stuff.  Good grades.  High marks in fitness, even.  Presidential fitness award.  Played classical piano for school assemblies.  Was in choir.  Church-attender.  "Good girl."  You know.  Typical hallmarks of your classic nerd.  (That and I have adhd and don't edit my thoughts super-well and was much, much verbally stumblier than I am now, and I am now very stupid in social settings so you can guess at how gawky and stumbly and unpleasant I was in all my excited, bubbly dorkiness.

Big-ass sigh.)

So.  Threatening older-brother who was a decorated athlete and over six feet tall in high school, x nerd signs all over my personal front yard = devestating lack of courting from all but the most annoying male members of the society of my high school for the bulk of my participation in its circumference, unwilling as I mostly was.  This informed my theory of How I Looked To People, Both Male and Female.  I.e., unattractive.

(A year in Brasil as an exchange student during my junior year, as a sixteen-, and then seventeen-year-old horny-ass girl in a foreign locale rife with seriously hot, very willing protagonists, UNaware of my nerdy persona nos Estados Unidos and aWARE that I was a horny-ass Americana, gave me a new perspective on my appearance.  I still chalked up the interest in my sexual wares as my being foreign, being American, sort of like how boys at my school would've probably behaved toward the female French exchange student, no matter how mildly attractive, if we'd ever had one, simply because of the stereotype about how sexy French girls are.  There sure as hell was a stereotype about American girls in Brasil, thanks to American cinema.  I was a disappointment to an awful lotta fellas who assumed we'd be fucking within seconds of an embrace based on the myth.  So I had enough sense to recognize I wasn't merely attractive as a result of my physical merits.  I just wasn't sure what the balance was.  I got that I was taken more at my current value than I would have been if I were still at home, attending my regular school, allotted all of the baggage of having grown up alongside the people there.  Still - a somewhat muddy reflection of me, in the end.)

Once my sentence at public school had been served, with time off in the foreign spot for good behavior, etc., I began to have a better idea of my appeal.  I wasn't sure, despite that, because the adhd is so off-putting and socially crippling.  I'd assess the mirror for hours, turning this way and that, smiling, pouting, mincing, but it never gave me that final assent: yes, you are pretty.  No, you are not pretty.

I just wanted to finalize it, just nail it down, so I could carry on and walk through my day either confident that I was, and behaving accordingly (whatever that fucking would've entailed), or not.  I settled on -- feeling unsettled.

I had a few boyfriends after high school, between the years of nineteen and twenty-one, one of whom was very outdoors-adoring, and once I'd been on enough adventure-dates with him I realized I hated a) makeup and b) him.  (He was an utter ass; lovable, but really, just as ass as a human can be.)  The important thing I took from the relationship was how stupid and pointless makeup is (I'd already come to this conclusion about bras that give the appearance of larger, rounder breasts) - the deception is just embarrassing once the moment of truth arrives, and then you feel like you owe the lucky person an explanation, which sort of totally sucks the sexy out of a moment like nothing else. 

So I was determined to discover the level of my attractiveness to those-who-would-be-attracted based on my natural appearance.  (Also, I figured out just how much I genuinely liked sex, having it, and not allowing stupid shiz like embarrassing, oh!, my breasts are NOT double-Ds! moments to complicate or, truly, dilute the pleasure potential.  HEY, YOU, EMBARRASSMENT: GET OUTTA MY ORGASM.)

Enter stripping.  (I know, it ain't classy-sounding, like "burlesque."  I don't sugarcoat.  As already explained w regards to the makeup and bra business.  You will eventually adjust.)  The convoluted beginnings of the stripping I may have already explained in some prior post, but I don't remember, and I don't much care.  That was that story, this one is this.  And I cannot pinpoint just what it is making me so pissy about refusing to extrapolate that part.  Guess it's my dislike of the imagined audience giving me a scolding look.  Your scolding looks are angering me.  Especially the imaginary portion of the (imaginary) audience, which, btw, includes you.  Yes.  You.  Stop smirking.  Let's un-de-rail this thing, shall we?

It took a while, and some coaxing on the part of many acquaintances/friends made in those cloying strip-club dressing rooms that were sometimes closets with a mirror and a low shelf and a bulb dangling from a string, to recognize the validity in costume for the role of stripper.  I had to be almost held down at one point, by a woman who viewed herself sort of club-queen at the Pure Platinumb (the "b" in that is my clever addition) marched me over to her chair, who plopped me down and proceeded to clown my face out of existence under several trowels-full of heavy makeup.  The works.  Then she shoo'd me out of the dressing room where I'd been dithering and into the dark club, where I was suddenly reacted to by SEVERAL customers at once.  As in, more than two.  Possibly as many as three.  It was weird.

After that, I got more comfortable with the idea that I was attractive.  I got used to being whistled at or looked at as a pretty, a beautiful, woman, though -- not really.  I was always sort of surprised by it when it wasn't at a strip club.  If someone spoke to me on the street or wherever people say random things or make animal noises at pretty people, it always sent a shock of color to my face and a mumbled thanks or stupid thing that would burble helplessly from my lips.  The reason this is kind of amazing is because, if I were dressed in a two-inch skirt and fishnet half-shirt minus any undergarments, with a full face of makeup and hair pinched and prodded and six-inch stilettoes, I had no difficulty firing back immediately if someone said something to me regarding my appearance, or really, anything at all.  It was the costume - it empowered me to be bold in my response to an approach by a strange person, woman or man.  In my day-to-day, where I wore large, balloon-ish, clown-y clothes that never alluded to my job, I was incognito, and as such, unequipped to respond to comments about my looks.  Shocked, even, when people would hit on me when I was dressed - goofily, in thrifted, sloppy, ill-fitting things that hid my shape, my hair in a low bun, my fifties-librarian glasses with no lenses masking my face.  Why would they? - I wasn't pretty.  I didn't have any of the markers of a pretty girl on my person.  Surely it was fool-proof (it wasn't). 

So looks are mostly about markers, I figured out, especially because I leapt from dancing to acting school, and got even more into costumes and props and markers and what does and does not conspire to make someone react to one's appearance.

At a certain point, I realized that there was an element of basic, good genetic shape to my physique and my facial structure that made people think I was pretty or good-looking or whatever, but that I could disguise it, mask it, or I could appeal to a certain sub-set of people based on the costume I was wearing at that moment.  Some days, I deliberately appealed to the crowd, because I needed it.  I needed them to tell me I was pretty, good looking.  I needed them to approve of me without knowing me, without learning about my tics and my dorky, shivery-lapdog behavior that would out me if I were sans costume, because I needed the ease of approval from strangers.

Some days, I did not want that approval.  I would go as far as I was allowed (particularly at work, where, uh, looking ugly and unappealing was rather frowned-upon, but I pushed it as far as I could, just to test the people around me, test them to see if they would discover an attractive person beneath the ugly, crusty, off-putting exterior, because I wanted to believe that if *they* could find that attractive person in there, maybe she really did exist).

(This was all very organic, very indirect.  I wasn't aware of all of this on a conscious level.  I can see it now, plain as day, natch, but back then it was just some foggy feeling I intuited about how I should operate, some weird, ingrown vibe that I found irrestible and was obedient to.  No better explanation for the behavior than that, which seems sad, somehow.)

And then some good and bad things happened, and I quit acting and I quit life, sort of, at least, I seriously tried, and would have succeeded but this dude who eventually became my husband intrigued me and then insisted that he wanted me to stick around and have his babies and be his incredibly argumentative wife who refuses to do or be anything he would really view as "dream girl" quality but then be horribly contrary and work tirelessly to do and be all of the things that constitute that person when he isn't expecting it, and oh!, did I mention, my husband's a (medal pending) saint?  Because he is.  A grumpy, mostly perfect saint.

So here I am.  Thirty-six and grabbing the last dregs of these days of what I finally realize are pretty ones.  But get this: it's already nearly gone.  The sands have shifted downward, they have slipped trickily out of my grasp even as I scrabble over the surface of my body of my face of my head of my sanity and clutch, clutch, clutch.  The costume days are drawing to screechingly abrupt halt.  I am - aging.  I am not pretty any longer.

I wouldn't resent it so goddam much if I could have ever, just for one goddam day, really believed it in the first place.  I didn't know I had it 'til it was gone.   And - make no mistake.  It is GONE.  Irrevocably, irretrievably departed.  My costumes now will involve ridiculous old ladies.  How much costume they'll be is anyone's guess.

I reach out for old age and I beg for it.  I am no pious patient.

*attempts to leap over yawning chasm onto opposite shelf where old age rests, refusing to acknowledge how that maneuver has never yet worked, that cutting in the line is impossible and the growth necessary in the interim is vital, and in fact the attempt to cheat somehow seems to delay the growth so much that it will arrive later than it does for everyone else and she will be left, standing, alone, behind, ashamed of her attempted circumvention of the necessary route through painful reality and its resultant pain will lacerate her more as it is coupled with shame*

Eat me, oh, young, oh, youth, oh, offspring.  Pierce me with a skewer and devour me.  Save me from this slow, wretched amble into obscurity, into the dust, into ever-deepening madness.  I am not so dried and hollowed that I won't still make an excellent meal. 

Just be sure to put some gravy on the table.  In case.

the "health" exception.

I had an abortion when I was about seven weeks along.

I was working as a temp at the time.  Twenty-six years old.  No health insurance.  I made about $1200 a month.  Couldn't afford to live on my own because I couldn't cover rent, car insurance *and* living expenses simultaneously.  I had just moved out of my best friend's one-bedroom apartment, where I had been paying slightly less rent than she, with her in the bedroom and me in the eating area of the kitchen (I'd rigged up a wall of cardboard-and-fabric between the breakfast bar and the kitchen for "privacy").  Was in-between, uh, well, just generally in-between (and, yes, I'm referencing The Cure here, along with my horrific life in my terrible twenties).  Staying at my parents while I hunted for a reasonable place to rent that would be close enough into town that I could give up my car and just bike to work.  Had discovered a teeny 1-bed next to Laurelhurst, somewhere near 32nd and Stark - but adjacent to the park, so sort of between Stark and Burnside.  Just where the crummier houses leave off and the mansion-y places begin.

I was still sort of suicidal from being wrecked by my experiences in Alaska the summer prior; being molested by one of my roommates there really fucked up my head and I spent that winter after I returned being an utter mess.  I won't describe it.  I've done so before and I don't feel like going down that path just at this moment.  It was horrid.  I wanted to die but I didn't exactly want to have to be directly implicated in the process, so I just did all kinds of self-destructive things instead.

The abortion was out-of-pocket.  My boyfriend paid for it, as well as for the additional general anesthesia expense (more than doubling the cost, making the total around $500, as I recall).  He had allowed me to make the decision (I'm sure it hurt him very much to leave that up to me, particularly because of the one I did make) as to whether I would terminate the pregnancy, but he insisted that I have general anesthesia as opposed to local.  He knew I couldn't face such a thing if I were only locally anesthetized.

(I still live with the guilt of having had the privilege, the luxury, of general anesthesia for the procedure; because of all the other women who experience it with only local anesthetics, their thoughts of what is happening to them intact afterward.  It is - it is unfair, it is cruel, and I will never forgive that small part of me that was too weak to face what I was doing to myself, to my would-be baby, too weak to watch.  To be present.  I am still ashamed at my own cowardice in the face of it.  When others *must* face it because they cannot afford to do otherwise.)

I never allowed, to myself, to him, to anyone, that I was hurt.  That it hurt me to do such a thing.  I only cried when I tried to get assistance from the state of Oregon in order to cover the cost of the procedure and they turned me down, because, as they explained, I made approximately twenty-seven dollars too much for them to give me even their most basic level of coverage.  The person I spoke with said that I would have to have a child in order to receive benefits.  I explained, but you see, I plan to remove any need for Oregon to have to cover me on their plan on a long-term basis through this procedure that I need and cannot afford, if you could only help cover it.  I'm SAVing you! - the state! - MONEY!, I said, plaintive.  The woman simply shook her head, her mouth a line.  No.  No, she told me, adamant, you can't receive coverage *until* you have the child.  I said, hah aahhaahha hahah.  That's so funny.  I am trying to terminate the thing that would require you to pay for my insurance.  I just need a little help to do so.  And she said, Yes.  I understand.  You still can't get coverage until you *have* the child.

(The irony, of course, is that those who would insist on a woman having her baby regardless of the circumstances, is that she must then scrap and scrape and save and work three jobs in order to support the child, because there is simply NO WAY those same insistent folks will fork over the social services, i.e., their taxes, to assist such a woman in caring for the baby after it is born.  No! to the welfare! queens!, they scream.  Get a job, loser!, they scream.  Have your baby, even if you were raped!, they shriek, and in the same breath, they blaspheme you for leaning on the system to raise that child.  The one they said you had to have because otherwise God would smite you.  You shouldn't have had sex, they simper, if you protest.  You slut, they imply, the corners of their mouths tucked in just-so.  That the man who fucked you and didn't have any requirements post-fuck?  Ah, well.  Such is a man's luck.  Oh, shame on those men, they cluck, their feathers bunched tight around their big asses.  But where is the man?  And where is the evidence?  And does that man get to go on and have a profitable, head-held-high kinda life?  While his child's mother toils and strains and struggles, the system with its allure of come-hither-and-have-your-child, the system giving you another good fucking-over, once you've had it, where you must place your child in daycare and work during the day and maybe another part-time or full-time job at night to pay for the daycare and the health care and the fucking mandatory car seat that costs a minimum of $150 for a decent one, never mind the pricey kind that consumerreports.org insists on if you're a good, mindful parent and want your child to actually be *safe*, the $300-and-up variety, and there are the co-pays and the medicines, the over-the-counter cough syrups and inhalants that you try to give your sick, miserable child in vain in order to help them sleep so you can sleep so you can work so you can pay for the care and the medicines and the formula because you couldn't breastfeed because you had to go back to work when the baby was six weeks old and you couldn't afford a breast pump and then you find out that the formula and the bottles and cough syrup are possibly, no, DEFinitely toxic for your baby, your sweet, sweet baby they insisted you have because God would curse you and where in the world are those people now?, you wonder in the spare moments when you have the energy and presence of mind to wonder and not fall into the pit of despondency over your life, your whirlwind maddening life of work and toil and never seeing the child you gave birth to because they told you you must, backed you into a corner and threatened you with everlasting hell if you didn't listen, and now the aspersions and looks and glances you get on a daily basis when you're with your child, the whispers and the looks and the withering eyes that burn you, because, while it's no longer socially acceptable to comment to a single mother that she's a slutty sinner, the eyes still have it.  Oh, they have it.  And the man is off somewhere in Ibiza with his new girlfriend, the one he met in college while you were with your baby working sixty hours a week and barely surviving.

And the irony of the system giving you the fucking-over after you've already been fucked over is not lost on you.

But I know you're already aware of that.  I just had to say it.  It feels good to say it.)

I left.  Head high.  Stumbling a little on the way out to my boyfriend's car, and letting that be the reason I cried.  But then, crying, because I knew, if I couldn't acquire state assistance, on my oh-so-robust wage, that there were women already with babies and kids who HAD to live on less than I was doing in order to receive state-provided benefits.  SHITTY ones.

and I cried for myself because I had to go through the procedure because I was too unstable to have a baby.  Drunk.  Drugs.  Series of relationships too miserable to recount.  Latest boyfriend totally, bizarrely different, but -- based on my experience leading up to him, I knew better than to rely on the notion that it would survive my - me.  however, I wrapped up that crying portion of the crying menu quick.  didn't need to linger.  this was too important.

I could not do that to another human, not knowingly.  Not with the little handful of sanity I clutched, desperate, like a miser with a small collection of dirty pearls gathered from dustbins around a large city with dark pockets.

I had a dream about it, just before the procedure.  A morning or two prior.

I don't want to relate the dream.  But I remember it.  I still don't know what it meant, if anything.  But that it has remained with me, that dream, makes me feel its significance, all of these years hence. 

I woke up after the surgery and I was sick.  So sick.  I threw up.  A lot.  My old friend happened to be a nurse's aid, worked with the doctor who performed my surgery, only at a different clinic.  I'd requested that she be present during the thing to - watch over me.  She held me while I barfed in the clinic's toilet.

Weeks later, I still bled freely.  New, orange-red blood (because my uterus had been swept clean, so the lining had to replenish itself, which takes time).

I will never forget.

I will never forget what it meant to decide with lightning speed that I would not produce a child that I could not give up if I were to carry it to term because I don't trust people.  That I could not be a mother to. 

I occasionally -- maybe once every few years -- do the math.  Think about him, especially now, in relation to my son.  How old he'd be (of course I have no idea whether it was a boy or a girl but I have somehow, in more recent times, chosen his gender as boy.  Not sure why). 

My health exception was life-and-death.  My own life.  The child's life.  My prescience regarding this subject was crystal clear, the cleanest pane of glass you ever laid eyes on.  I could not mother that child, I could not give it up to some stranger to mother.  I would have done terrible things that the child -- oh, I don't dare think of what I would have done.  I cannot.  They are unspeakable.  Unthinkable.

I was not in the third trimester.  But my health was at stake.  Sanity.  My life.

Now - I have a child.  One who will be (relatively) unscathed by my current bordering-on-insanity, because of, thanks to, my supportive, wonderful parenting partner, and our family.  (I hope.)  This, after I've aged and settled down and done some soul-searching and taken some anti-depressants and other shit, besides.  Grown up a little (as much as someone stricken with the permanent childishness of adhd can).

Is that not to be made exception for?

I would not have this now, my son would not exist, this life we have now, it would not exist, if I had not been able to decide to release that first child from me.

Is that not a health exception worth excepting?  Accepting?  Is that something someone, anyone, could have possibly decided for me, given all the details I have deliberately not shared here - the ones that would convince the most ardently anti-me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was choosing correctly - that is, if thou hast spent any longer than a sliver of time inside this skin, this spirit?  That thou canst do if not in possession of this uterus, this heart, this head?  And to think, for but a moment, that thou wouldst attempt to do so for any NUMBER of women.  I am mortified by it.

Am I a blip on the lefty-liberal agenda?

the current dem candidacy smackdown, as viewed through the lense of an ex-stripper.

Back in the dark ages when I was, indeed, a stripper - and I happened to be one for several years, so it wasn't as though I just dabbled; I know from whence I speak - I encountered loads of conflict.  From every arena, in every gender-on-gender way.  I saw men fight men; once, when Jay, my best gay boyfriend, drove me to work for an evening shift, he kind of didn't really want me to go in because right before I got out of the car, we watched a stream of dudes exiting the rear of the building, the first of whom was badly bloodied from face to groin.  The second was carrying aloft what appeared to be a javelin, but was, in fact, I kind of remember, a closet pole dowel thingy (you love me for my scientific specificity, huh).  The first guy had evidently stabbed some dude, boyfriend to one of the other dancers, and then got walloped by some yokels.  It was dumb.  Another friend of ours, along for the ride, happened to be an EMT and was all, "do you think I should *gulp* go in?"  I said, sure, yeah, alrighty.  The subtext of that statement was YES PLEASE DO NOT MAKE ME GO IN THERE ON MY OWN.  It ended up fine, and I danced the night away to fun tunes like "Rock and Roll All Night (and Party Every Day)" - it has been my humble opinion for the last few years that the title of that song ought to be altered to "Walk and Crawl All Night, and Potty Every Day," but then, I'm the mother to a toddler who has lately made me want to chew through my chains and bolt.  But that's just this week.

like a faucet.

I was just spouting off yesterday.  I need to do it occasionally, so the damn doesn't burst, etc., but I feel better today.  Well, okay, anyway.  J is at my parents' house and that helps, but mostly I just want to finish having to slice deep into my gut and reveal the black memories that dwell therein to my therapist in order for him to add it all up, all the pieces that will help him best determine what kind of pills I can pop that will bandage up the wound I had to slice open in order for him to make that determination and OY.  Well, alright, to be fair, because I'd already sliced it open when we moved, but it was a messy, imprecise cut, less cut and more rend, and this latest one was medically administered with a sterile knife, but after I leave a session of pulling out spaghetti intestines and the blood has spilled anew and I have to somehow shove it all quickly back in and run through the gray rain to my gray car on the gray road and keep it sealed for a week, for another session of poring over the grisly, tar-coated innards, well, I'm not entirely capable of keeping things sealed properly.  I was always that kid who picked at the scabs, pick pick pick, and yesterday, I had not allowed the bandage to adhere cleanly to the wide-openness directly beneath its immaculate surface, I had to peek along the edge.  Just to see, you know, whether it was still there or whatever, and then - hey!  Oh!  Right!  I was raped in high school, and also molested in the eighth grade, which, while I don't count it as my first kiss, it technically was, and then there was Alaska, and god.  I shiver over sharing these things, these scary details, because who wants to see the wreckage?  People want to read blogs to laugh, even at the goriest of news items, we want to see them and shiver darkly and then get a good punch line to lighten the load, and I have no punchline.  Instead, I'm angry, I'm pissed, PISSED at those FUCKERS who have made things so much goddamn harder for me, this life that is already not a simple trot through each day, even for those who have been lucky enough to escape molestation on any level (of whom I am convinced there are but few).  So, I'm angry.  And I share because - you wanna know why?  Because there shouldn't be a ban on talking about having been taken advantage of.  I was stripped of my power in those moments, and -- here's a funny (although not punchline-y, sorry) thing:  when I was a stripper, throughout the entire experience, I recall hearing people say things like, Oh, you know, women who are in the adult entertainment industry have all been molested or raped at some point.  And I was always like, huh.  Well, that makes me an anomaly, doesn't it.  Since I'd somehow managed to completely forget that I was molested *and* raped before I finished high school.  You know why?  I'm gonna tell you that, too!  Because I didn't relate to the textbook definition of molestation or rape.  I thought about those precise, defined specifics, and compared my versions to those, and went, oh, nope!  None a' that here!  And when I shared the stories brokenly to my friends, their blank looks and non-responses or the occasional "Oh." brought me up short, made me think I was over-sharing and frightening people and I should probably just stop telling those stories that frightened people and made them not want to hang out with me.  Shame on me for having told anyone, was all I could feel and think. 

Isn't that all terribly funny?  Funny-weird, I mean.  I know it's not funny.  I don't feel like laughing.  Rather, I feel -- like I don't want to have a daughter.  Because I'll be compelled to tell her what I went through, and though in a perfect, best-case scenario, my explanation is clear and clean and her reception is solid and logical, and she learns from my stories and is careful about where she goes and what she does, but -- dude.  The guys who molested me in the eighth grade?  Were in the middle of a party of kids who were not drunk or stoned or high on anything other than their own selfish agendas and thought the whole thing was funny anyway.  So do I ban my future daughter from attending social functions altogether?  Well, no, but I would hope she would know to push someone away and call attention loudly and clearly to the inappropriate behavior, strong enough and confident enough to know that the molester should be humiliated to attempt such a thing in the midst of a fucking party.

But would she be successful, even then?  What if it didn't matter - what if she were molested anyway? 

How could I live with myself, having not prevented such a thing, and having allowed this precious charge of mine to experience something that has fucked me up like a rake in a hurricane?

Ah.  This is all such a THING, this mess.

SEE why we have to talk about it?  The more it's out there, the more stories we share about our losses of power at different but still important moments in our lives, the more "textbook" definitions there will be available for people to learn from, to see as mirrors or useful comparisons, to watch out for as roadsigns, to draw strength from, to recognize their own experiences as having been something more than a private, shame-filled thing to closet and keep buried.

Let's talk about it.  Talk about it here.  Please.  Don't give it any more power, not just over yourself, but over the future would-be molesters.  Let's use our old pain as a weapon for our kids.

If you don't want to identify yourself, you don't have to.  Be anonymous.  Or email me your story and I'll post it sans name.

This is one way to keep our kids safe.  You see, I'm aware that this could happen to my son, too, whether I ever have a daughter.  I don't want it for him, either.

malaise. fancy for sad.

I can tick the signs off on fingers, the signs that point to my having been an alcoholic when I was living in Anchorage during the spring/summer months of 1998; that is, the epiphany just occurred to me.  It slid in, stealthy, and gained steady traction as I idly stirred a fuzzy memory.  This while going through the monotonous motion of patting J's back while he struggled against falling asleep for his nap a little while ago.

• the night I played pool, staggering drunk, with a fellow I'd only just met a little earlier that evening; a guy I knew I would generally disdain hanging around, but, hey!  I was drunk, so who cares. 
• the night, as the sky grew pale, that I fell on the stairs (of which there were a whole two) leading up to the matchbox house I lived in with several other people, the one-bedroom hovel with a basement full of boy stench and fetid socks and bong-water stains and putrid drunk breath heavy in the air, the bedroom I shared with the other girl, my side neat as a pin, pretty things arranged and tacked on the wall, her side scattery and disheveled; the bedroom that had no door (unless you count the one that I hung after purchasing it at the local hardgoods store, the door that was for an RV, the one that didn't actually close because it was too short).  while carrying a pizza.  slipped on a puddle.  bruised my thigh from hip to almost knee.  this was bad, because I'd decided, aching in this choice but feeling I had no alternative, to go back to dancing, after having been fired from my job working for one of the cruise lines.  which leads to the next bullet point:
• the night I went from sitting at a bar in the wee hours with a few of my crew mates from my job working for one of the cruise lines (but not on the ship; on the inland train, the cruise train, that toured from Anchorage to Fairbanks and back) to waking, slow, pained, clotted in the brain, next to one of the crew mates, a guy who had just been dumped by his longtime girlfriend, someone I wasn't REMOTELY interested in, someone who happened to be the brother of the fella I'd been seeing earlier in the season, the fella I had a heartache the size of the state over.  waking to the realization that I would truly never have a shot at that fella after this pathetic mess.  waking to the realization that I was TWO HOURS LATE for the train; waking up and racing, heart a-jangle, to the phone, to call! and! explain! my! mistake! and realizing, too, as I dialed, as the phone sang tinny in my ear, that it was useless, because everyone who had missed the train before then had always been fired.  no exceptions.  moot tears sizzling along my burning cheeks and spotting my knees to no avail.
• the night I was molested by my roommate.  as I begged and pleaded and screamed and hit and swore and pleaded and begged and cried and finally quieted to a whimper that did not cease, a whine I heard as his hands roamed over me, like a mosquito buzzing, that I could not completely discern, nor shut off.
• the nights I spent at that man's house, as the summer waned, the one I was semi-dating, mostly against my will, but my will was broken and battered by the late point in the season at which I was seeing him.  he wanted it, and I gave it because I did not have the strength to keep him at bay, although my old self would have laughed to hear something so ridiculous.  it was ridiculous.  i was ridiculous.  although he was sometimes quite gentle, and sometimes I almost convinced myself that I liked him, but mostly I just hated him, throat full, with clenched fists cloaked in silence.
• the night I blacked out at my co-worker's apartment, the bartender at the local dive where I'd managed to get an every-Saturday-night shift working as the cocktail waitress after being fired from the cruise position.  how shocked I was at his accusal of my drinking as being a problem when I woke up, groggy, on his sofa in the morning.  terrific.  the shame crept in, black and crepe-y, hanging loose about my throat.  I slunk away like a guilty dog.
• the night I was so depressed I'd told my only friend that I wanted to commit suicide and asked her to check in on me later, and she didn't.  because I was such a sack of complain-y shit.  everyone I worked with was convinced of it.  especially after my roommate told our entire crew that I'd - I don't know what he told them, specifically, I only know that after the night he molested me, he got on the train the next morning before I did and passed the word along that I was a slut or something like that.  so that tainted me, his words, his enhanced abuse, and then my drunken antics later in the season only deepened the hue of their disapproval.  I was guilty before I even had a chance to explain what had really happened (the tale no one believed, because he'd already convinced them otherwise).
• the night I - oh, the nights.  how many nights there were.  how many, many nights.

(I will never love Alaska.  It is not Alaska's fault.  It's loads of things, things I long to make sense of, things I may never come to terms with.  It has been close to ten years and I still can't seem to bury the anger and hurt and violent, slashing gray pain.)

But, somehow, it feels good to talk about it.  Needs airing.

*****
Updated to open comments, because maybe some of you have a story that needs airing, too, and you don't want to air it elsewhere.  Or you don't feel safe talking about it on your blog.  Or you'd forgotten it until now.  Anyway, I shouldn't be selfish and hog the microphone.  Here.  Take it.  Dump that shit right out.  Then let's dance wildly and yell swears at the fuckers who hurt us and flail our middle fingers in the air, and then - you know what?  then let's just move. the. fuck. on.

Or not. 

Whatever.

*****

Even later update:  How sad is it that I only just now, this instant, realized that I could have turned the asshole in, the one who molested me?  It NEVER occurred to me.  Also, something I realize as a result of knowing I could have done that, is that it hurt to have no one believe me when I said I'd been molested.  It made me not believe it myself.  I still sorta don't believe it.  I mean, I know it happened, but if you made me swear that it was a true molestation, in the dictionary definition sense, I'd waver.  Because I felt like it was my fault.  For being drunk.  For being pretty and desirable and drunk.  Dot-dot-dot.  Etc.

Huh.  Kinda gobsmacked.

pop and lock.

I keep trying to formulate this post in my head; it's been brewing for months.  I've sort of arrived at the stage where I either write it and get it out of the precious real estate it's taken up for so long, or dispense with trying to make something out of it.  But I don't wanna.  I think it's fascinating, and if I were in school I'd write a paper on it. 

The "it" I'm referring to is the subject of our ability, in this culture, in this society, in this particular time in history, to choose to not have children.   It fascinates me.  It's the underlying motive in those slights on the part of so many who can't stand kids toward the ones who choose to.  It's the complicated wedge that keeps so many people in our social sphere divided, a wedge that would not have existed, did not exist, around one hundred years ago. 

So why are there so many anti-kid snobs?  I say that, fully aware of my past, filled with years spent standing on my box of soap that declared my revulsion toward the childbearing ilk.  (I think my revulsion was probably rooted in my own fears about having children, and that I then aimed it at those around me who declared their lack of fear through the act of reproduction.  But this isn't a post about my need for a lifetime of therapy.)

I can't help wondering when we're going to move forward, however lurchingly, beyond the adolescence of the ability to decide when/where/how/who with the procreation process within our society.  I feel strongly that we're in a growing-pains stage, and boy is it painful.  I, myself, have made pretty full use of the various options; I relied on birth control to get through a ridiculously stuck-pig bleeding era in my late teens, experienced en tandem with some severe cramping (at one point, during my senior year of high school, I had my period three times within the month of December -- it was a pretty unforgettable experience, and I'm not referring to Nat King Cole's version).  I've also had an abortion, when I found myself pregnant, broke, crazy, suicidal -- and incapable of becoming a single parent.  These are not things I took lightly; I was aware of my options, and I made the best choice for myself and for any potential offspring.  I don't explain for the sake of self-defense; I do it to make clear how strongly I feel about the subject of choice in reference to a woman's uterus.  I believe absolutely in the need for women to be free of the shackles of forced motherhood. 

However.  I do not believe in the attempt of those who opt out of the maternal role (or paternal, because obviously there are men who choose similarly, and get the snip-snip to prove it) to foist their new-found choice of freedom from parenting on those who decide that they wish to procreate.  Especially in the form of non-parent-snobbery.  It's ridiculous.  Where's the live and let live in that?  It's like a new religion.  I'm really happy for people who find they are satisfied with their lives without children, and I wish they could feel equally happy for those of us who go the other route; I recognize the defensive nature of their choice, because they're probably being hounded by their parents and other family and by society in general to have kids, and they push back with snobbery.  But it isn't right.  It's just more negativity poured into a cup that is already too full of bad feelings.

Let's all just do what's right for our own lives and be moms and dads, and if not that, then really fun, wacky aunts and uncles.  And love each other.  (Insert finger in mouth at this point, because even I'm gagging over my lovey-poo-ocity in that last sentence.  Although I totally mean it.)

Happy fucking holidays, bitches.

(Leaving comments open 'cause I'm intrigued about your thoughts on this one.  But if you slam me for my choices, I'll be really excited to delete the shit out of your comment.  Oh, and also mock you plenty.  Bye!)