Nine years
ago I pushed a baby into the world after nine months of swelling pregnancy and
fourteen hours of heaving labor. The
valley was in the early hours of what would become a ferocious ice storm when
my water broke. Sweetie drove me to the
hospital around the mountain we’d expected to drive over; the roads were sheeted with ice. In the eerie mid-night we passed a function
hall. In its all but deserted parking
lot a man in shirt sleeves and a bow-tie talked on a cell phone. I wondered if we shouldn’t stop to help,
maybe it was some kind of emergency. Gradually
I remembered we were some kind of
emergency: I was a woman in labor, driving to the hospital in an ice storm.
The sense of dislocation I had
during that surreal drive did not dissipate in the weeks following my
daughter’s birth. I was still caught in
the experience of birthing her—from the yellow brine that splashed out of me
onto the wooden floor to the pile of dirty linens stacked beside the birthing
room toilet; from the icy sweetness of the fruit punch my doula held to my lips
to the surgical light that pierced my
eyes when the midwife stitched my perineum; from the contractions that moved
like fire across my belly to the sweet absence of all self consciousness when a
room full of women cheered for me to pee.
Some weeks afterward I remember
walking in town with my little bundle of baby tethered to my chest and
marvelling at all the dressed and upright people. How is it that we move through the world like
this, with modesty and decorum and any sense of propriety, when so many of us
have recently been naked and sweating in the presence of God and medicine and
the brand new people we grew in our bodies? I wondered how women come back from those
months of hemmorroids and urinary incontinence and heartburn and breasts with
aureoles the size of dinner plates, let alone that night of blood and shit and
screaming pain, to ever pretend that mustache bleaching or nail tips have relevance.
I walked the city street, changed my baby’s diaper, drank a coffee, but
some part of me was still in that night I would describe as ”sexual and
religious ecstasy.” My baby was out, a
girl growing in the world, but I had not left that labor room.
In the wake of the Penn State
child rape scandal I’ve been thinking about—and feeling—this kind of
dislocation again. Suddenly the
airwaves, the internet, the newspapers and water coolers are flooded with the
reality of adults hurting and failing children.
Incredulity is the affect of the moment as the world comes to common
consciousness of the fact that adults hurt children, and other adults let it
happen.
But for those of us who have been
perpetrated against—and those of us who believe those who have been perpetrated
against, and who work with and serve and advocate for those who have been
perpetrated against—there is nothing new about the reality of sexual violence
against children. Wherever we are—at the
gym or the coffee shop or the supermarket—some part of us is always caught in
the reality of violation and cruelty. Survivors
move out and grow in the world, but some part of us never leaves the moment of
our most grievous injury.
And like the army of women who
have gestated and birthed, the army of those who know the truth about child
predation is legion.
What I’m puzzling now is the
paradox of this incredulity and widespread knowledge. How the culture can be surprised by the truth
of child sexual abuse while such vast numbers of us already know it, having
learned in the very cruelest way. What
I’m puzzling now is how any of us are compelled to be upright and dressed, to
move through the world with modesty and decorum, knowing that adults routinely
violate children and other adults let it happen.
The question for me really is not
why Penn State football fans rioted in the streets when their beloved football
coach was fired. The question for me is
why those of us who have been wronged do not riot in the street every day. If our private grief were made public, our
anguish and keening, the red light of our rage could burn this world down to
the ground.
