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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781646030279 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Regal House Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 234 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Our Bodies
Catholic Bodies or Notes from the Kavanaugh Hearings
By Mary Catherine Ford
It happens even before you know you have a body. When you are a whirl of running, plucking earwigs from rotting tree trunks, kickball, and laughter, without knowing how you sound, how you look.
Before you know you are to be an object, you are told.
Before you can understand your hips, the new shape of you, an expansion beyond the body you've always known and believed to be your true body, before you understand your breasts and can come to accept them as belonging to you, you're told by boys and men what they are to the world: too small, too big. You come to know yourself through the words of those boys and men.
There is a Catholic way of talking about puberty, and, in my experience, it is this:
Do not wear shorts that are too short, even at home. You have older brothers. Do not try to tame your frizzy hair with Vaseline and put your curls in a side ponytail and then try to leave the house, because your mother will say that you could be mistaken for a prostitute and raped. Given your neighborhood, this may have been a credible fear. There is a van that sits by the park with blackout windows where prostitutes work. You fear more than anything disappearing into that van. You do not know what sex is, but you instinctively know what a violation would do: erase you.
How can a mother shield her daughter? When mothers transmit these messages to their daughters it feels like an act of desperation, reflexive, a recitation of what they were told when they were young. If I had really heard what my mother told me, would I have been safe? And what of the lessons mothers neglect to teach their sons? The catechizations come at the same time your body is changing, your emotions a torrent.
Gradually, a girl's body starts changing into a woman's body. But these surging hormones can also make your mood go up and down — and sometimes it may seem as if your body is out of control. But no one told you the reason for your mood swings. You think you are falling apart, losing your mind to a darker expanded reality. You know so little about the physiology of your own body that when you are fourteen and backstage at play practice and a boy says something to you about babies and vaginas, you blurt out, "But babies come out of your butt, don't they?" He bursts out laughing. You are fourteen years old and you do not know the evolutionary function of your vagina.
It is withheld from you, the why and how of your body changing. This takes something from you. It isn't something you can necessarily recover once you understand what is happening, because while your body transforms you know only the messy shame of it. The biological explanation for what is happening to you is as unknown and mysterious as transubstantiation. Shame becomes part of the change.
You are not told the physiological reasons for your breasts and menstrual cycles and pubic hair, only the risks your new body poses to your soul and the souls of every boy and man you come into contact with, from your father to your brothers to the men and boys at Mass, at the pool, on the playground, down the block, on the bus, on the L train, at the dog show, at the Museum of Science and Industry, at Church's Chicken, at the laundromat. Your body is not an organism and its living parts. Instead, you are an unwitting trap, a parable of temptation. You learn that these changes mean your body is a thing of danger.
As you grow up, there is a war coming at you from within and from without. There is a Catholic way of talking about puberty, in my experience, and it is this: Your body is a thing you must restrain. But how can you command a body when it has morphed from something unnoticeable into something you don't recognize? And it's awkward and uncomfortable, the hairy legs and arms and armpits and, worst of all, the wiry, stubborn pubic hair that refuses to clear away even with persistent shaving. The stubble and ingrown hairs plague you and you don't want to go to the pool, but it's so hot, the Chicago summer, and so you run from the safety of your Strawberry Shortcake towel to the pool's edge in a flash. You pray all anyone saw of you before plunging into the deep blue pool was a blur. You pray to be just a blur.
There is a Catholic way of talking about puberty, in my experience, and it is this: Do not go from the pool to five o'clock Mass in shorts and a T-shirt and sit alone when you are twelve. You do not know yet that a boy might be drawn to you, let alone find you desirable. After all, what is desire to a girl who is scandalized by the book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
Do not go to that Mass. After you stand and sing, "One bread, One Body, One Lord of All" and kneel and pray and wish peace upon your neighbors, after you take communion, a teenage boy with shaggy brown hair who is two heads taller than you will walk up to you as you are leaving your pew and say calmly, I wanted you to know that because of your outfit I had impure thoughts and couldn't take communion.
He will walk away, and you will stand there alone in St. Edmund's church as the late light of the afternoon pools in rich purples and greens around your bare legs. The church is your favorite because of the music and the huge stained-glass windows depicting the stories of Lazarus rising and the Wedding at Cana, because its walls are covered with tiny squares of gold leaf and if you stare at the flecks of gold and then press hard on your closed eyelids the gold covers your vision until the whole universe inside you is shining.
You will not have said a word to the boy. The lesson he has taught you is one you will hear again and again, until you finally leave the Catholic Church: your body is at fault.
That fall, after you start middle school at the Opus Dei school for girls, you begin going to the Opus Dei Center on the weekends. There, the numeraries, in their ankle-length jean skirts and pale Laura Ashley blouses, lead talks detailing the Opus Dei take on everything that might concern a young Catholic girl on the precipice of womanhood.
In the Opus Dei, female numeraries are celibate like nuns but don't wear habits and can marry if they are called. To assist in the goals of this ultra-conservative body of the Catholic Church, a numerary submits to plena disponibilidad, full availability.
You were at the Center because you had been invited and someone picks you and your sister up and drives you there. At twelve years old, you don't know much of the small but storied organization, not that Pope John Paul has recently favored it as the first personal prelature, not that the numeraries are rumored to whip themselves in penance.
Was it at the Opus Dei Center you told one of the numeraries about the day you tempted a boy into sin? Or was it on the long car ride to Washington D.C. for the March for Life?
In September 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford comes forward and accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982. Sexual assault takes over the news, your thoughts. For some of us, it happens even before memories form. There is someone in your family, an uncle, who drinks himself to sexual violence against his sons, against his daughters. You spend some weeks at your cousins' house when you are two years old. Your mother is in the hospital and there's been a terrible fire in your house. You come back home with an infection in your vagina. The infection goes unexplained or is explained away as neglect. What did your family doctor say, the same doctor who treated all your cousins after their assaults? Did a tear in your hymen occur then? Did something happen during those two weeks to form the strip of scar tissue over the middle of your vaginal opening?
The story of the electrical fire in your house will be told again and again throughout your childhood until the flames and the subsequent escape down Mr. Freeman's housepainter's ladder becomes something like a memory. Even walking barefoot through the heavy frost in your cousins' yard, a memory your older sister relays to you will come to feel like a memory of your own. But it is not.
All through your childhood, what no one tells you is that you came home from your aunt and uncle's home with a vaginal infection. It's another silence. But when you are fifteen, your sister says you might have been sexually abused by your uncle when you were two years old. And your uncle's home, that time, becomes rebuilt in your nightmares.
In those nightmares, the bedroom you and your sister shared with your cousins is too dark to see. Your spirit leaves your body as your uncle squeezes you until you can't breathe. Though you have no memory of this time, you discover what you think is a scar from then. A strip of flesh stretches over the middle of your vaginal opening and causes tampons, once expanded with your menstrual blood, to become stuck inside you. You sit on the toilet in the bathroom for what feels like hours, crying quietly, desperately, painfully trying to extract the fattened wad of cotton. The toilet tank drips and drips, you re-read the Morning Offering glued to the bathroom mirror. Oh Jesus, I offer you my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day. That cord of tissue does not break. Not then. Not years later when you try to have sex for the first time.
You text your sister: What did Mom tell you about when we had a fire in our house and went to stay with the cousins? I used to have this weird scar tissue over the middle of my vagina.
She sends you a link: 14 things you never knew about the hymenal ring.
You send her back a link to Johnny Cash's song, "Ring of Fire." The hymen has variations on the theme. The microperforate hymen completely covers the vaginal opening and an imperforate hymen has only a very small hole and the septate hymen has an extra strip in the middle that creates two vaginal openings where there should be one. "The extra tissue (of the septate hymen) can be torn during tampon insertion or sexual intercourse."
Hymen, from the Greek word for thin skin, membrane. A hymen can break easily, when a girl does the splits, when she is horseback riding, speeding down her block on her pink banana seat bike, colored tassels streaming from the handlebars. These hypotheticals belong to a girl who is not you.
Along the edges of a damaged hymen a process known as re-epithelialization can take place. Epithelial cells migrate across the new tissue to form a barrier between the wound and the environment.
Did your body, after it was violated, build an obstacle to protect itself from future abuse?
At sixteen, when you move away from Chicago, you tell your mother, "I won't go to Mass anymore. I am tired of how guilty Catholicism makes me feel."
"Well, what do you have to feel guilty about?" she retorts.
You have your own room in your new house, and you start to use a small mirror to look at your vagina. Think back to that age. Can you still remember what that tissue looked and felt like? It was ropey and thick. Like a vine of flesh had trailed down from your clitoris and firmly embedded itself in the inferior portion of your vagina. How could it have been anything but scar tissue?
One hundred seventy-nine thousand search results for "septate hymen." You stare and stare at the search images on Google. This is not what you remember from all those years ago. Though it is smooth and deep pink like the rest of your hymen, the flesh is too thick to have ever been broken by a tampon or sex. And it hadn't been.
When you try to have sex with a boy for the first time, he can't enter you, despite all his attempts. You go home that night and use a pair of scissors to cut the ropey flesh apart.
Here is another point of fear, another way your changed body could betray you and cast you into hell — abortion. You grew up going to Pro-Life Action League marches in Chicago in the 1980s. Come January 22, your parents would bundle up you and your siblings against the freezing cold in itchy wool and corduroy and you'd all hop on the L train to the Loop with enlarged photos of aborted babies, their limbs like tiny crushed wings, broken jaws, their tiny fingers glued to heavy-duty poster board.
All you ever understood about abortion as a young child was that it was murder. Birth control was murder also, only the baby was tinier, almost invisible, like the soul itself, seen by God but unseen by the mortal eye. You knew that abortion doctors lied to the women and then killed the babies. And the murder of their unborn children would haunt those women all their lives. While premarital sex was almost unthinkable, you knew abortion was far worse. Abortion was an unforgivable sin that cut you off from communion, from the Church, from Jesus Himself. The aborted babies were killed before they could be baptized, and so they all crowd together, waiting for the Second Coming in limbo. Limbo was not hell, certainly, but was beyond the Gates of Heaven, beyond the touch of God.
As you got older and had your first kiss, a paralyzing fear gripped you. Would you become pregnant and have to choose between giving up the future you envisioned for yourself — making your way through Ireland by working on a steamer ship, becoming a poet — or killing your own baby in a secret abortion?
One New Year's Eve, you and your first boyfriend keep to one side of his basement while your best friend and her boyfriend have sex on the other side. Your boyfriend kisses you and you tell him to take you home. He breaks up with you the next day. When you hear that his next girlfriend has two abortions, all you feel is relief that it wasn't you.
Here's what a young woman who is you understood: the worst sins come from your body.
Here's what a woman, who has spent the past thirty years weeding out those lessons of shame, is trying to wrap her head around today: white, Catholic women defend men and boys at the expense of girls and women.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh bring you back to the lessons from your Catholic school days. The conservative Catholics you grew up with question Dr. Ford's veracity, her timing, the motives of Democrats. Every aspect of the process is scrutinized unless it involves Brett Kavanaugh. You should have anticipated it, but you didn't, and now you are angered by the number of women who defend him and question his accuser.
The women defending Kavanaugh say:
This isn't a conversation about sexual assault that should be guided by the "Me Too" movement.
We can't believe her just because she's a woman.
With abortion at stake, it seems they will stop at nothing to preserve their unholy sacrament.
You find yourself spinning back into the orbit of the conservative Catholic world you left decades ago. How have these women stayed loyal to a way of being that had so poisoned you? In a Facebook thread with women who were also raised in the Opus Dei, you and your sister try to voice that Opus Dei Catholicism injected a toxic ideology into you and infected your understanding of female sexuality, of consent.
Your sister writes: Girls were taught that they were responsible for boys or men having "impure thoughts" about them. We were often told a story about a girl who went to Mass in a short skirt. She went to communion as usual but when she knelt afterwards the boy/man sitting behind her tapped her on the shoulder and told her that he had not been able to receive communion because he had had impure thoughts about her, and that she had made him sin.
Someone on the thread asks: Who told the story?
Your sister responds: A numerary.
You immediately DM your sister to tell her the story was about you. Your sister writes back: Some people are Twitter famous.You're Opus Dei Shaming Famous.
Your sister was a year ahead of you in your Opus Dei school. She went to Center meetings that were only for the older girls. It was there the numeraries told her about the girl who made the boy sin, a story she came to think of as a fable made up to scare her and the other girls into modesty and submission and deference to men. The numeraries knew you, they knew she was your sister, but they never told her they were recounting her own sister's story.
Everyone has their own story.
Every woman has more than one.
As you grew up, a war came at you from within and from without. Here is what you learn by walking through the wider world too quickly: You learn that when you are walking home from play practice alone, after dark, in winter, and the street is empty other than you and a man, you should cross the street. You learn to cave your chest in, slump your shoulders, drop the light from your eyes. You learn to wear headphones meant to deter conversation, big bulky ones to cancel men's voices, even though they peel them off when they speak to you so you have to hear them, have to respond. Always you must respond. You cannot count how many men have catcalled and followed up your silence with the word "bitch" or the number of men who have assessed you. (I'm usually a tit man, but you have such incredible legs, you mighta changed that.)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fury"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Amy Roost and Alissa Hirshfeld-Flores.
Excerpted by permission of Regal House Publishing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dedication,
Preface,
Our Bodies,
Catholic Bodies or Notes from the Kavanaugh Hearings,
Would My Heart Survive Donald Trump?,
Letters Between Two Women Following the U.S. Presidential Election of the Man Who Grabs Pussy and Lost the Popular Vote,
Trigger Warning: The Supreme Court May Be Dangerous to Your Mental Health,
Hauntings,
Our Selves,
From Reaping to Reckoning,
New Normal,
Hope After Trump,
Panic Drapes the Look of the World: Literary Treatment for Anxiety in an Uncertain Age,
Our Families,
Does Family Trump Politics?,
Children Question the Bully's Right to the Presidential Seat,
How I'm Teaching My Jewish Daughters About Donald Trump,
Breaking Bad News,
Can We Reassure Our Kids Monsters Don't Exist When We Know They Do?,
When Parenting and Activism Collide,
Feminist Role Model,
Our People,
America, the Beautiful,
Fire in the Distance,
How I Found Love from My Homeless Neighbors,
It's Been There,
Fight Like Hell,
Viva La Raza!,
Love in the Time of Trump (A Letter to My Beloved),
What My Immigrant Mother Would Say About President Trump,
Our Work,
The Challenges of Being a Psychotherapist in the Age of Trump,
Trauma in the Age of Trump,
The Cat and the Cardiologist,
The Biggest Hole Is Where the President's Empathy Should Be,
Vigil of Hope,
Smoke,
Our Perserverence,
Bring Back the Batakas: The Long View,
Duty To Warn,
Rachel Maddow Sings Me to Sleep,
A Red Diaper Baby Returns to Her Roots,
Chop Wood, Carry Water,