A New Kind of Ache

Today was a rough day. Not as a student. Not as a mother. But as a woman. Just a woman.

For my extensive research paper I have been writing I have to research the violence done to black women in response to the myth of the strong, black woman. To do this I have been reading For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf and The Women of Brewster Place. Brilliant pieces of literature. The fact that my entire paper was about the violence done to women my research involved close reading a rape of a woman by a gang in graphic detail. Her moaning, her silence, her bloody stockings, her matted hair, her bruised knees, her split rectum, her slimy stomach. All words I had to close read and immerse myself completely into. Or how about the woman who was forced to have an abortion by her husband and watched as her infant daughter was accidentally electrocuted due to negligence. Or the woman who had her boyfriend come home from the Vietnam war only to suffer from terrible PTSD, abused her with high chair her infant child was in, she files a restraining order to protect her two children from him, he returns only to drop her two children out the window.

Light reading. I know.

Eight hours of experiencing the ultimate betrayal to a woman. Someone taking her children and murdering them as she stands idly by. Men violating the very essence of what make a woman a woman. Beaten and bruised she lay on the floor as mere body parts. Blood, guts, semen, hate, betrayal, lust, pain, exhaustion, frustration, denial… all packaged into a horrific act that gives a woman no voice… rape.

Each of these women must chose suicide or hope because there is nothing left. Stripped dignity, love, joy… humanness.

Broke my heart all day.

Zac fell asleep early (poor guy, he works 12 hour days) and I decided I would watch a light documentary/movie called Trade. Not so much.

I wept and wept watching a young Polish girl thinking she was coming to America to start a job and bring her young son over but instead is sold into the sex trade. Beaten and berated by men along the way. Raped repeatedly. Each sigh and each bat of her eyelids she thinks only of her son and the hope she had to have him come home…to her. I watched as she cried as she realized that she could never escape, smiled and them jumped off a cliff to her death. No hope. Just suicide.

A young boy in a headlock with a needle of heroin forced into the back of his head so some pedophile can have his way with him for twenty thousand dollars.

I walked out of the room. Sat in the middle of the kitchen floor and cried.

For a very, very long time. I cried as a woman who hurts for another woman. Not out of sympathy or some emotional response to a “sad story.” To be violated as a woman is the ultimate betrayal of everything that holds us together. Like we fragmented pieces of a puzzle held together by the bond we have as women. The strong force that comes from locking arms with another female and saying “I see you.”

I went into Cohen’s room and watched him breathe. He breathes 45 times in minute. He smiles in his sleep and I thought about the worst thing that could happen to me as a mother and a woman. Someone forcing him to be inhuman, to have no dignity.

God, where are you? What the hell is wrong with this world?

Tonight I’m thankful for being a woman and given the privilege of dignity. To be seen as a whole woman and not just as breasts, behind and pretty face is grace by God.

To any woman who has lost children, been raped, violated or succumb to the kind of hardship no one should ever experience… I pray for you tonight. That you will remember the God who sees and loves you.

I am thankful tonight for my family, for my freedom, for my life, as I know it… I hold none of it for granted. I pray for the exploited children who are succumb to a harsh reality. That they will see their maker and he comforts them when all seems lost.

My heart hurts. God be with us.