Tag: Supreme Court

On necessary anger & discomfort

It’s not easy reading, but it needed to be said. On Medium:

What will become of the white women who say they want the world to be better for all of us, but will not gather their white sisters or relatives at the dinner table when they say deeply racist things because they are all bound up in the comforts of the patriarchy that oppresses us all? How will we reconcile the addictive nature of comfort and how comfortable narratives keep us stuck in the lie of solidarity?

Are we willing to be angry with one another in the service of understanding that discomfort might be the thing that saves us?

Audre Lorde also said this back in 1981: “But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”

When your greatest shame is also what makes you free

The spring before I left the Bronx to go to boarding school, to accept a scholarship that would change the entire trajectory of my life, I had an abortion. I was 15.

I was raised a devout Catholic; I’ve always been a deeply spiritual person. But I also had been so desperately lonely for such a long time. My high school boyfriend was a dumb ass and so was I. But he was lonely, too, in a different way. Poverty, violence, rage: They make you want the instant gratification it seems that sex can provide when you’re young.

I got pregnant not long after my mother had a manic episode during which she threatened to kill me. I’d run away from home to my best friend’s apartment in the projects as a temporary solution, to gather my thoughts. That was the weekend, when I was 14, that I first had sex. Looking for safety, a home, somewhere, with someone.

I had been keeping a journal daily for at least six months up to that point. When I told social workers I’d applied to boarding school, that I didn’t want to go home because it wasn’t safe, but I just needed a few more months to figure something out, they told me I could go to a group home, but it was unlikely that I could go to boarding school from any group home.

Reluctantly, I returned home. When she tried to hit me again, I held her wrists. “The next time you hit me, I will hit you back.”

It was a small win compared to what came next, which was that she found my journal, which, because I was an idiot, detailed how ambivalent I was about a future I didn’t know I could believe in. On one hand, I believed that if I had a baby, my boyfriend would always have to love me, and it would mean on some level that at least two people — he and the child — would have to love me. Right?

On the other, I have never wanted to be a mother. I have seen what this world does to Black babies. I am named for one who was killed at 12. A day does not pass when one is not harassed, though these days, it feels lucky that they are not murdered.

My mother’s discovery of my journal triggered our visit to Planned Parenthood, where she recited her rosary, loudly, while we waited to see the doctor. This was, for the doctors, a red flag, that she would be so bold. They saw us separately — in retrospect, I don’t know if this was legal or not. Is it safe, they wondered, to tell her that you’re pregnant?

“Absolutely not,” I said, shaking my head.

When they called her in, they lied to her. I lied to her on the day that I went to have the abortion with one of my Catholic school classmates. I have never cried so much or so hard in my life as I did as I mourned my deepest shame.

By then, the packet of summer reading for my first year at the new elite school had arrived in the mail. I had stopped writing things down. I was going to read my way to my future.

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