Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
I was so stupid when I found out I was pregnant. I had no idea. I was 14 years old.
That I didn’t know missing my period meant pregnancy. Do I need to be ashamed? Do I have to tell you how many pills I swallowed to hide my shame? Do I have to tell you how it felt to have tubes shoved up my nose as they pumped my stomach at 15 years old?
But in just a few seconds, the test showed positive. Yes, I was pregnant. I called my mother at once and told her everything. Fortunately, she already knew that my husband Jim and I had been having marital problems for a while and that I had looked elsewhere for sex, so she wasn’t at all surprised. Nor was she judgmental.
I began tweeting my dislike for the president and even made a few replies to his public tweets. One tweet, in particular, annoyed me. He took a meeting and wanted us to pat him on the back. One meeting? Obama probably had 2-5 meetings every day he was in the White House. Trump needed a pat on the back for one meeting. It was laughable at best. I got over a thousand people liking my rebuttal tweet to Trump. It felt good to be noticed, but then I felt a little narcissistic for being pleased with the response. I hadn’t written anything newsworthy, but I got a lot of pats on the back. I had to tell myself step back and look at the big picture.
I think of all the women I admire most in my life, the ones who smile to expose years of laughter at the corners of their eyes or the sides of their mouths and I find so much beauty in that. So much grace in the lines of their foreheads, or the way a strong neck can still look so ready to shoulder so many burdens, even as the skin has begun to thin and sag just the slightest. There is something exquisite in the thin wisps of silver in my mother’s hair. The strands are so clearly defined, I can almost count them individually, as though I know how she earned every one.
I stared up at the drifting clouds remembering that sticky-hot cloudless day, steaming asphalt, the girl in the on her bike, screaming, cheering, my two-dollar bill waving outside the car window, skip-hop running, a marathon every day …never quitting, never stopping…only being stopped by the scariest word in the dictionary. I needed a word like that.
The most beautiful moment I had in college (aside from the day I bought myself a vibrator or learned to make poached eggs) was when I went to the lake, picked up a flat stone the size of a driver’s license and threw it. It skipped four times, just like that. I didn’t need CJ to show me how to do it, reveal any special secret to me. In the end, I didn’t need him, didn’t want him, at all.
Still, I believed I needed to look good to be happy. I worked out like crazy and tried to hide my bad teeth, which had been further damaged in a bicycle accident. Even after I found a great boyfriend who convinced me to get help for my eating disorder—probably saving my life in the process—I hated looking in mirrors.
Then, in a wine soaked haze, I realize what the worst part about this is.We are always on guard against the men in the streets. The ones who whistle while we walk. We guard against the men at the bars, whose smiles turn to snarls upon rejection. We guard against the men online whose thumbs could spell “slut” without help from their eyes. We are almost always on guard. We almost never feel safe.