Writing Isaiah Entry #14

Writing Isaiah 

Entry #14

8.12.13

Chris Kindy 

So, I've been thinking about what it was like for me being the first born in my family, a girl and my brother being the second born, the boy.  Even at the tender age of four, I felt the undercurrent of a perceived level of importance that we now had a "boy" in our family.  I can remember thinking inside my little head when my brother was brought home from the hospital, "So this is what everyone is so excited about?".   As an adult, I continually hear young mothers comment," I just feel different about my son then I do my daughter." While I'm convinced that those different feelings are real, the comment has the implicit air of meaning that the feeling is "closer" or " better" or somehow the ultimate of feelings once a boy enters their family.  I explain this observation to you, so that it can be the backdrop for my question.  How do you think you might feel different about Aurora and Isaiah with respect to their gender?  How might you respond to those people who you will encounter who will project the stereotypical response to the importance of having a boy?  What will it take to insulate Aurora from the feelings that I had that somehow I wasn't as important or enough?  I ask you these questions because I love you and Aurora so much and if anyone can counter these cultural gender stereotypes I know you can and will.  How can you teach others to understand that the differences in feelings may be just that, not better or worse?

Emily Joye McGaughy-Reynolds

The first thing I want to acknowledge in this writing is the acute pain that percolates in your prompt. It is not a pain foreign to me--the pain of being a female-identified person trying to make it in this male-adoring culture--but the pain here is unique. It is the experience of a girl child, confronting perhaps for the first time (tragically so within the one place that's supposed to be sturdy and safe, family) being unseen and undervalued vis-a-vis the male bodies around her. You write: "at the tender age of four." And while many four year old elder sisters have probably been erased, somewhat, when their new baby brothers came home, what's unique about this story, at least in my reception of it, is that it's you telling it, remembering it, offering it up for my consideration. You. My friend who knows too much and feels too much to ever really be comfortable. Whose memory of the past and whose presence in the present and whose premonitions of the future concoct a consciousness that stands alone in its abiding wisdom and unrelenting torture. If you weren't so fucking observant and connective (body, mind, spirit), you probably wouldn't look back on this episode at the age of 4 and feel how implicative it is for what was to come in your life. Your life, Chris. Our collective life, womyn (and men). That's what makes this unique. You refuse to look away. Then and now. It is what I have come to love about you more than anything else. Your clarity. Your bravery. And because of this wide-open-eyes-heart-&-head phenomenon you possess, I often grapple with powerlessness as your friend. You are destined, again because of who you are, to suffer. Suffer in unapologetically and unwaveringly staring at the utter wreckage of inequality, inhumane insanity, and needless, inexplicable tragedies in this life. As your friend, there exist moments when I wish I could remove that yolk from you. Not fix it. Because then I would lose the you-ness I cannot fathom living my life without. But rather, remove it, temporarily. So as to relieve you. 

Like, is there anything worse, than hearing about the painful episodes we endure as children? The moments when our innocence is lost? When the soul-crushing bully enters from stage left? Or the first racist joke is told at the lunch table? Or the defining "you're fat" stare descends upon the flesh, murdering the uncultivated, merely natural love-of-body claimed by kids? This shit makes me ache. I can listen to my mom and husband tell stories about contemporary adult struggles that are serious and hard, fully confident that they will navigate the turbulent terrain and come out on the other side mostly unscathed. But if either of them share stories with me about how they were picked on, silenced or mistreated as little ones, I feel a blood curdling scream and rearing-up dragon come to life in my gut. Like, who do I need to breathe fire on? So it goes here. When I read your words, I felt this immense sadness, because of patriarchy of course, but mostly because it was you. And then sadness gave way to vicious rage. But enough about me as an Enneagram 8. Weeks of time to ponder your story have proven kind: I am now ready to respond with a combination of head, heart, and warrior fire. 

How and when do we learn difference? How and when do we ascribe meaning and a gradation of value to  difference? Lyssa Howley and I were intellectually masturbating the other day, in the fellowship of Junot Diaz, after watching his interview with Bill Moyers. Diaz said something that has stuck with me in a palpable way all week: "Saying a distinction is different than drawing a conclusion from a distinction." I think many of us learn distinctions by observing the world around us, taking in the information available to us, and applying those observations and information in our own thinking processes. If those learnings and applications work, meaning we are able to integrate in an ongoing way what we experience with our inherited cognitive concepts, then we tend to hold on to the observations and information and continue using them. But if too much cognitive dissonance arises, we are forced to retread what we've seen and heard, what we've been taught and swallowed. Well, I guess we aren't forced. Some of us deal with cognitive dissonance by employing denial or making ourselves numb to it. But again, you're not one of those types, so I'll keep going on the other track. I don't know about you, but gender (and race a close second) has been cognitive dissonance facilitator #1 in my life. Part of that is because of the distinction that Gayatri Spivak writes about: how there is no essential identity and yet identities materialize into realities based on the essential properties we (sometimes intentionally, most of the time unconsciously) arbitrarily attach to them. Like, I know I'm not and you're not and no person is society's brand of "girl/womyn/female" and yet because that brand exists, and some of us fall within its fictional yet material reach, we must grapple with the reach itself. There's no way to escape gendered realities in our world. But unfortunately I don't think we enter into the complexities of gender first. I think we enter by imitation, assimilation and acceptance in order to survive. It's only later when shit gets uncomfortable or feels unfair that we begin to question the category. 

I'm not sure when I learned that girl and boy were different, though I do remember a penis/vagina conversation at the breakfast table when I was...uughhh...3 years old after I'd been staring at my dad's genitalia in absolute bewilderment. Isn't that interesting? In your story and in my story a body outside of our own body becomes the signifier by which we come into an awareness of difference. So when did we learn to draw conclusions about the distinctions we made between "our" bodies and "their" bodies? Sounds like you took in, or at least figured out quite clearly, that male supremacy was a value in your family. The people who brought you into this world, who were most responsible and well-disposed to influence you, taught you through agency and unconscious bias, that you were less than. Is that when internalized oppression began? Or is that when a life-long fight was inaugurated? Probably both, right?

So here's where I get tripped up. 

I've done so much work on gender, in therapy, in academia, in spiritual life, through queer community, on myself, with others, ad infinitum. I've gone through the phases of imitation, rejection, and integration. I feel pretty comfortable in my own skin these days. Which is nice. But I fear for the gendered realities my children will face. And since we're talking about fear and reality, I'm also afraid of the racialized realities they will face. Both of my children will face supremacies that they don't fit into. Aurora will contend with patriarchy. Isaiah will have light-skin privilege but he will have to face, both outside and inside himself, white supremacy. If either of them have disabilities or find themselves affectionally-oriented outside of hetero-normativity, there will be other wars waged on their lives. This is terrifying for me as a parent. And yet...

Religion has its merits. Lately I've been thinking a whole lot about the phrase "be in the world not of the world" as it relates to the radical incarnation of Jesus. I'm pretty convinced that all the supremacies, all the oppressions "of the world" stem from a logic of body-hatred. That somewhere in the history of humanity, we looked upon our bodies and upon the bodies of others as some huge horrifying mistake. Maybe that was the original "Original Sin." Maybe. Anyways, I'm also pretty convinced that the eternal magic of Christianity, what I simply cannot tear myself away from, is its inherent (yet easily explained away and avoided) insistence that the Divine became flesh and dwelt among us. Which suggests to me that God loves bodies. And we should too. All of them. All bodies. No exceptions. If God made body home, then home is the body. Right? To be "in the world not of the world" as a Christian, for me, right now, means employing a body-love-logic at all times, but especially in relation to those bodies that are most hated, stigmatized, oppressed "in the world." Gustavo Guiterrez, a Latin American liberation theologian, wrote that God exercises a preferential option for the poor. That when it comes to justice, God takes the side of the poor, always. I'm trying to believe and do the same except i'm broadening the category of "poor" to include "all bodies, but especially those most marginalized and despised."  

What I'm trying to say Chris is that I think fighting supremacy is one thing. But radically loving is another thing. I was writing with both Tricha and Dominique this last week, along with a host of other womyn (some you know and some you don't) about spiritual power, body phobia, healing and love. What I took from almost all of those interchanges is what the world needs now is love sweet love. And it needs it tangibly, fiercely, in the flesh. Like, womyn looking upon each other, whether in family, friendship or romance, with affirmation, kindness, care, erotic devotion and unfetishized desire is needed now. We need this from all genders, actually. Last night I spent 7 straight minutes holding Aurora's little soaking-in-the-bath body up to my adult soaking-in-the-bath-body. Talk about endorphins of love. It comes close to breast-feeding in the spiritual union category. Anyways, I don't think we can undervalue how moments like those, moments of skin to skin, unpressured, touching and loving for the sake of touching and loving, go in the way of building incarnational and relational esteem. We need to love ourselves, yes. We also need people on the outside to show us how magnificent and worthy of intimacy we are.

So my commitment in the way of breaking down male supremacy in the arrival of Isaiah into our family is to love Aurora more tangibly and fiercely in the midst of the distinctions drawn for her and those she draws for herself. Not apart from Isaiah. But in the dawning of his presence, in the company of his life with her life. It's good modeling. For both. And, you know me, I'll probably have to go off on some folks who try to impose their body hatred logic on my family from the outside. Then I'll come to you, tale/tail between my legs, in need of counsel on how to atone for the fall out. You'll listen, give sage advice. We'll walk around the block, to the park, and back again, sit down on the couches and chalk it all up to another day in the life of those who face it all, feel it all, fight it all, forgive it all, and still somehow find the energy to keep on loving/living.