Follow Your Bliss

Pegasus Books, Cuba Mall, Te Aro, Wellington 6011, New Zealand

There is an email earmarked in my inbox linking to an interview with Joseph Campbell, where he discusses how to follow your bliss, that I took time out of my *busy #sabbaticalled schedule to watch recently:

“If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you. And the life that you ought to be living is the one you’re living somehow. And, when you can see it you begin to deal with people who are in the field of your bliss and they open doors to you.

I say follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

A quote like this puts me in mind of Bob Dylan’s Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which is a resource I return to again and again, especially as a writer struggling to keep self-sabotage at bay.

“Where do you look for this hope that yer seekin' / Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin' / Where do you look for this oil well gushin’ / Where do you look for this candle that's glowin' / Where do you look for this hope that you know is there / And out there somewhere?”

Being on [Chris’s] sabbatical, while fraught with privilege, has put me back on track to follow my bliss. I have the time and space to look for hope while out on my daily speed walks. How do I know I’m on the right track? Because it feels as though while wading a stream that hasn’t yet been bridged, stepping stones pop up one by one underfoot, in time with my crossing, to keep my feet dry. It feels like I’m creating something, just by living, and whenever I get that familiar feeling, I know I’m following my bliss.

It started a few weeks ago, listening to Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Sarah Polley, in which they discuss her now Oscar-winning screenplay for Women Talking. The women in Polley’s movie evaluate three possible responses to sexual abuse within their Mennonite colony: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony.

Then came Legacy of Speed, a podcast about this photograph from the 1968 Olympics:

which I’m familiar with from my poster-selling days but hadn’t before considered the importance of. Malcom Gladwell discusses economist Albert O. Hirschman’s book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, which lays out three options available to those with a grievance: exit (boycott), voice (stay and speak up), or loyalty (stay, keep quiet, and hope your commitment pays off in the long run.) John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the Olympic runners in the photo, chose voice, and it destroyed their careers. I won’t spoil Women Talking for those of you who haven’t seen it; the women make a different choice, just as valid.

When I juxtaposed the two podcasts, it struck me how both presented the identical set of tools to engage oppression. Both podcasts reveal options - exit, voice (stay and fight) or loyalty (stay and do nothing) - activists can use to facilitate change. The coincidence of listening back-to-back to these two podcasts began to seem purposefully designed.

Then came Because of Anita, which includes a discussion between Professor Anita Hill and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Talk about women talking! From this podcast I discovered another famous image - an ad in the New York Times, paid for by over 1600 Black American women who wanted their support of Anita Hill documented in the historical record.

Professor Leslie Hill holding the NYT ad “African American Women In Defense of Ourselves”, originally published Nov. 17, 1991 (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

When asked about their motivation for testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee as an act of citizenship, both Hill and Ford describe it similarly:

Ford:

“For me it was in a way a calling…from the country, or from my civic duty, as a citizen, that I had to say something.”

Hill:

“When you have something, and you feel that it’s important, that it’s critical, actually, then you can stand up in a different way then when you’re thinking about it in the abstract. For me the whole idea of patriotism and why I felt it was my responsibility and duty came not just as a citizen but also as a member of the bar. I had felt in my life how important the Supreme Court’s decisions are…and I knew firsthand the importance of…a court having integrity, and the integrity of the court was only as good as the integrity of the members of the court…Also, my civic responsibility came not just as a member of the bar but as a teacher, to students who were going to be members, and in teaching I not only tried to teach them the law but I also tried to teach them their responsibility to the law.”

Bingo. Of the tools available to activists I’d just learned about, both Hill and Ford chose voice, they chose to stay and fight. Out of a sense of duty to whistle-blow bad behavior that would otherwise negatively impact a judiciary accountable for the good of all. But their efforts came to no avail. Even though TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS elapsed between the appointment of Thomas and Kavanaugh. Has nothing changed, I asked myself? Instead, as Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, we saw Amy Coney Barrett replace RBG. While we may momentarily talk truth to power, power will continue to silence us for generations to come.

Hm, I needed to get my hope back. Because of Anita is only four episodes long, and I kept listening. Finding your bliss might just mean making sense of your life, but I don’t want to have to be on sabbatical to do that. I want to do that everyday. And I don’t want to have to wait another quarter of a century for perspectives to change. What the heck is wrong with these tools we’re using, as activists, I wondered?!

In Because of Anita’s final episode, Journalist Irin Carmon offers a few reasons for why progress seems to have stalled. First, government still does not view sexual harassment or assault claims in the same way it does other whistle blower stories. And second,

“The standards by which we evaluate credibility tend to reward winners. So if we are evaluating why should I trust this person over another if it’s an incident in which only two people were present, for example, then we’re using an inherently biased system to say who is more credible. Because the Catch 22 here is that if a survivor was irreparably harmed by what happened to them and they went on to miss work, quit, well how easy is it then to say: ‘oh well she’s just disgruntled. she’s just unhappy that things didn’t work out for her here.’”

This explanation really blew my mind. So it isn’t (as it may, in fact, seem) that the social justice movements I’ve been a part of since high school have not made one iota of progress. It isn’t that feminism has failed. See, we’re not crazy! It isn’t that grassroots activists have toiled for three decades in vain. Instead, “we’re using an inherently biased system to say who is more credible.” Carmon offers us at least one reasonable, rational explanation for why a quarter of a century after the Senate Judiciary Committee disregarded Hill’s testimony, they did the very same thing to Ford.

Now we’re getting somewhere I thought, and as I walked and listened, it’s following my bliss that got me here. I knew what step to take next - as an activist, I knew what inherently biased system to challenge next.

Following my bliss makes me feel like I’m learning from life. But more than that, it has allowed me to write this elaborate blog post, sewing my thoughts together into a coherent narrative, connecting them like a sticher would a quilt. Making something out of nothing to arrive at a larger understanding about how to take the conversation forward in the direction I want it to go, in the direction of the truth. At least until I happen upon evidence of another inherently biased system, which I then need to launch into fighting with all my might.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v8

Photo depicts staffers and co-founders of Ms. Magazine, including Gloria Steinem

Dear Editor,

Ruth Bader Ginsberg said this in 1993:

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices.”

fox news launched in 1996.

The reason RBG has always been important to me is because she framed the issue of abortion as it relates to the freedom and rights of the MOTHER. By 2005, when I was in grad school, the issue had already been hijacked by the conservative, religious right-wing, who manipulated the conversation around abortion to frame it in relation to the freedom and rights of the “unborn.” At the time I could feel the backslide, I knew feminism was loosing its foothold, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

The fall of Roe v. Wade evidences the decline of feminism; we have got to turn that decline around. Now that we’ve been debilitated back to 1973, we have got to wrest back that frame. We are not our mothers, or our grandmothers. We cannot be forced to live like they did, simply too much time has passed.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v7

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Dear Editor,

I have been thinking a lot about blame (which surprisingly is *not* one of the stages of grief). I don’t want to hear one more person lay the fall of Roe v. Wade at the feet of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I blame trump voters but at least there’s a through line in what they believe - first, they believe him, second, they believe fox news, and third they believe in an invisible, extra-terrestrial higher power called god, and it’s now the decrees of that belief that determine what living, breathing women can do with their bodies (and this coming from someone [me] who sometimes go to church:)!

But I also blame the rest of us and am struggling to find the through line there. How is this our fault? The simplest answer I can come up with is that we haven’t been political enough, because it’s too painful and too uncomfortable be political. I hate talking about politics in any situation that may cause even the slightest distress, especially with people who aren’t as “progressive” as I believe myself to be.

But as of now our reality is being legally defined by people who believe that bringing every pregnancy to term is what is best for the physical and emotional well-being of ALL women. By people who believe adopting out an “unwanted” child to strangers will be less painful for a new mother than terminating the pregnancy would have been. It’s our reality that is being legally redefined and if we don’t start talking about - and keep talking about - why we demand the right to abortion than that reality could disappear all together. Without Roe vs. Wade you really are going to need to become involved in politics at the local level and educate yourself about pro-choice candidates and elect them, which might sound overwhelming, but if we don’t do it now then our reality will literally disappear. How depressing.

On Mothers, Michelle Obama, & growing up in Chicago

Photo by Alex Nemo Hanse on Unsplash

For International Women’s Day 2021, I was intrigued by the theme: Choose a Challenge.  I know, I thought, I’ll pick implicit bias, and my mother! What could be more challenging?

On January 10, 2017, during Barack Obama’s Farewell Address to the nation, I first learned Mrs. Obama’s maiden name. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. I remember Mr. Obama pronouncing it in full and being surprised by how “Black” it sounded. My name is Michelle too, and since 2008, whenever I met someone new I’d introduce myself by saying: “I’m Michelle, with two LLs, like the First Lady.”  Over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency, I became, and remain, a fan of his wife. And like most fans, my interest in Mrs. Obama was based more upon what that interest said about me as an individual, rather than on anything in particular about her. During the turbulence leading to the 2016 election, I took comfort in the speech where Mrs. Obama coined the phrase:  “When they go low, we go high.” But it wasn’t until Mr. Obama’s Farewell Address, when I heard him say his wife’s name in full, that my interest was piqued. She had a name that sounded like Jenny’s, from the Block. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Hm, I thought, before she became a political and feminist icon, and international emblem for simple decency, had she just been an average, middle class Black woman? I wasn’t sure, so when her autobiography Becoming was published, I read it. 

The description of the home where Mrs. Obama grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and where she lived when she worked as a lawyer and met Mr. Obama, captivated me:

“On Euclid Avenue, we were two households living under one not very big roof.  Judging from the layout, the second-floor space had probably been designed as an in-law apartment, meant for one or two people, but four of us found a way to fit inside. My parents slept in the lone bedroom, while [my brother] Craig and I shared a bigger area that I assume was intended to be the living room. Later, as we grew, my grandfather...brought over some cheap wooden paneling and built a makeshift partition to divide the room into two semiprivate spaces.”

This living situation sounded familiar; in fact, it replicated almost exactly what my mother wrote about her experience growing up in an Italian neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, near Grand and Pulaski.  Here’s how my mother describes it:

“The inside of the basement apartment had a small bathroom, two small bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a small living room. Whenever I was in the house, I was only an arm’s length away from someone else. I slept in one of the small bedrooms with my mother, my father slept on a hideaway bed in the living room, and my brother slept in the other small bedroom. The emphasis on my place was, you guessed it, small.”

The likeness was so obvious, my immediate thought was: as an average, middle-class white woman, my mother should see herself in Mrs. Obama. Except she doesn’t.

My mother credits her upbringing with endowing her with fortitude and resilience. And although my relationship with my mother is complex, one thing I know for certain is that she created an enriched environment for me to grow up in. It astounded me to think that Barack Obama’s wife, the First Lady of the United States, had grown up in a tiny space almost identical to the one my mother grew up in. That would mean, I realized in wide-eyed astonishment, that Michelle Obama’s mental fortitude rivals that of my mother! [Duh!]

Politically, my mother and I are at odds, but fundamentally I revere my mother, I love her, and fear her, but in a good way. The unsettling thing, for me, is that I did not see my mother in Mrs. Obama the minute she took the stage in Chicago, after Mr. Obama’s victory, in 2007. I didn’t see her there because Mrs. Obama is Black and my mother is white.

The only encouraging thing about all this, is that although my mother may not see herself in Mrs. Obama, I do, now. And my daughter, who was born on the day Barack Obama won re-election, always will.

National Dress Day 2021

Photo of Gilda Radner

I am a cancer survivor and in July of 2018 I participated in a cancer patient’s tradition: I rang a ceremonial bell to celebrate the end of my radiation treatment. The moment was truly magical for obvious reasons; my treatment had been successful and I was that much closer to being cured. I wore the Fresco Shift dress by Mata Traders to commemorate. When asked to “pay homage to dresses and the magical moments that happen when we wear them” for National Dress Day, March 6, 2021, I knew immediately it would be the moment I would have to write about.

As a founding partner of the social impact brand Mata Traders, when I undertook the difficult task of informing our producer partners about my condition, one of the directors in India replied: “[I] feel very relieved to hear that you are on the path to recovery already. I trust the medical care that you get there. Anyone with money here go[es] to the States for cancer treatment and come[s] back perfect. I am glad you are in safe hands and in a better country to deal with situations like this.”  

Every day since I rang that bell, I feel more jubilant, more fortunate, more thankful for my situation, my strength, and for the people in my life. Yet all the while I am aware that even surviving cancer, having access to the financial, medical, social and psychological support networks that made that possible, is a privilege. Insurance is a privilege. Disparity in cancer care is the norm. It is, in fact, why groups like Gilda’s Club and Imerman’s Angels and Phil’s Friends exist; to provide the support, free of charge, that marginalized communities cannot often access but that cancer patients and their families require to mount a robust challenge in defense of their health. And I too benefited from these organizations and the networks and resources they connected me to. My successful prognosis is a credit to both the high quality healthcare I received at Advocate Illinois Masonic, a Community Cancer Center, and the support groups I joined. These organizations are doing impactful work to provide support networks for everyone in the community. 

Paying homage to a dress I wore on a journey from patient to survivor makes me grateful for the resources I am able to access, and also committed to helping others create or access them. Thinking back to that day, in that dress, when I rang that bell, made me want to ask all of you: what have you done in a dress? I am certain that you have each survived something more significant, more impactful, more powerful, then I have. Share your stories with friends and family, or email them to me. I would love to read them. And maybe next year, on National Dress Day 2022, instead of sharing my story, we can share yours.

Woke

Photo of Shirley Chisholm during a campaign speech

“I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace” - Taylor Swift

My grandmother was a big-boned Italian with full lips, thick red hair, abundant, well-placed moles and a sculpted Roman profile that would make Helen of Troy jealous. She was prejudiced, but no one considered her to be racist. For one thing, she worked with Black people. Mostly Black women, as a keypunch operator for the city. She climbed the ranks to become supervisor and retired with a decent pension, and described what she endured as “reverse racism.” All those years, those Black ladies refused to invite her to sit with them at lunch, they never asked for her to join their card game, and that hurt her feelings!

My mother was definitely not as prejudiced as her mother had been. She even invited a Black couple to her wedding. The picture of Dr. Green wearing a long-sleeved, floor-length, floral gown and her husband, in a color-coordinated ruffled shirt, is the first wedding photo in the album she’d show off for company. Dr. Green was her thesis advisor in graduate school, and a woman, and Black. My mother couldn’t praise her enough.  

My parents raised me in the suburbs and in high school I joined the Cultural Awareness club. Eventually, I came around on the subject of white privilege, which the Club’s second-wave feminist sponsor venerated in hushed tones. Growing up where everyone was white, at first I didn’t believe in white privilege. Privileged over whom, I always asked. Ourselves? But, I respected the theory and agreed I was probably prejudiced, just in ways I couldn’t necessarily perceive, in the same way I probably benefitted from systemic injustices in American society, again, unknowingly so.

In college I was more fearful of befriending the Black women who shared my dorm suite then I was my white Jewish roommate, though I’d never met another Jewish person before, either. Around Black people my speech ground to a halt; if my suitemate had given me a present wrapped in festive wrapping paper, I would not have known what to do with it. [open it, duh!] At functions hosted by Black students, I didn’t, for example, offer to clean up, which I had otherwise been taught was rude. There was a chasm of difference that frightened me. The world I moved in simply wasn’t very diverse, but not for lack of trying! I attended Delta Sigma Theta and Delta Gamma rush events. I listened, attention rapt, as one of my suitemates’ boyfriend’s explained football was about white men defending a goal bound by two white poles - representing the open legs of a prone white woman - from penetration by a brown phallus. I even attended a Louis Farrakhan rally and became hysterical, asking my Black neighbor:  “Do you think I’m evil?”

I was, frankly, relieved to discover the concept of microaggression. It felt good to name the feelings of alarm that overcame me, apropos of nothing, as I passed a Black man walking in the opposite direction. I tried not to, but as I shifted my purse to the shoulder furthest from him, relief and shame washed over me simultaneously. Whenever I heard a “Black” voice at the other end of a customer service call, I felt justified, instead of undignified, if I “had to lose my temper.” When a Black child wandered over on the playground, instead of greeting him with a smile, as I would a white child, I found myself ignoring the boy, and as my awareness grew, struggling to consciously include him, which seemed worse. 

I knew I would never see the same potential that I saw in my daughter, in a Black teenager crossing the street with his jeans belted below the curve of his buttocks, his cotton boxer briefs raging. Until reading Becoming, I thought Michelle Obama was just another “angry Black woman.” And when I read Between the World and Me and asked myself, am I the type of white woman who would have pushed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s five year old son off the escalator? I knew in my heart the answer:  maybe yes, maybe no, which wasn’t good enough. 

So, what I do about it?

My husband and I enrolled our daughter in a preschool that catered to immigrant and refugee communities; meaning, the school was majority Black. It also happened to be the public charter school with the most economical before- and after-school-care program in our vicinity. Our daughter was one of only two white children in Ms. Mary Anne’s preschool class, where she flourished, she blossomed, she became beloved. I would hear, as I entered the school building, echoes of her name being sung like a hymnal. Everyone knew her, all the other students wanted to be her friend. I thought my daughter’s experience would mirror that of the few Black kids I’d grown up with; they had been the only ones. I thought my daughter would be an outsider, an other, that she wouldn’t belong.

But the funny, and terrible, thing is instead of being ostracized, she was adored. She was popular, her attention was constantly sought after and playtime with her was jealously guarded. I had wanted for her the experience of being excluded, so that she would learn not to exclude others, especially those most different from herself, and learn to welcome the outlier in her midst. Instead, she was put on a pedestal, almost worshiped.

My daughter wasn’t born a racial minority, and only spent a single year at the charter school that served them. But my daughter turned out differently than me, and my mother and grandmother before me. She wandered around the playground looking longingly at groups of Black girls to befriend before approaching the white girls at school. She deferred to Enesio and Tanisha and Aaliyah in a way that she didn’t defer to their white counterparts. She was more comfortable talking to Black women commuting home on the “L” than to white. 

Did I do my duty, I ask myself, as a self-described woke white woman? I guess it’s a start. It’s not enough [it’s not reparations], but it’s a start.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v6

Photo of notorious friends Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia

Dear Editor,

For some of us, the 2016 election ushered in the post-compromise era. As an idealistic, former Cultural Awareness club member in high school, this was a precarious position to be in. I was taught to both respect, and have, an open mind. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" and all that. My initial reaction, when criticized for not having an open mind with regards to Republican policies, is to fall back on the obvious: I am a single issue voter, as I have made clear via social media. Reproductive justice and abortion rights are what I care most about; I will vote for any Democrat who supports the pro-choice movement, no matter what else (I’m ashamed to admit) s/he has done. But this got me thinking: how many Republican voters are single issue voters too, and simply supported trump in the same vein? The reason I asked myself this was because the 2020 Democratic presidential victory has given me the energy to begin to look at compromise as once again possible. If we are all single issue voters at heart, how can we compromise if those issues are in conflict?

One thought I had was to connect over the issues we do agree on, so I did an online search for pro-choice Republican groups. DM me if you know of any! I didn’t have much luck finding one; the Republican Majority for Choice doesn’t seem very active.

My next idea was to force myself to expand beyond my single issue. If I could do it, maybe some Republican could do it, too, and we could finally connect over that issue. Holding myself accountable to my yearning “to be more than an ally, but an accomplice” with the Black Lives Matter movement, I volunteered with Chicago Cares to be trained to “coach” [I am not a fan of this word] local job-seekers at the North Lawndale Employment Network to develop and practice job-seeking skills. When asked about the meaning of implicit bias, I said it was when you didn’t see the same potential in, for example, a Black child (like Barack Obama) playing basketball as you do a white child (like Alexander Pichushki) playing chess, when neither child is known to you. That really got me thinking, but more on that later. If a radical, pro-choice militant like myself is able to broaden her activism to encompass additional (albeit social justice) issues, maybe your everyday Republican can, too? So, if you’re, say, a fiscal conservative, we won’t be able to compromise about the economic viability of that, but perhaps we can connect around a shared disgust for a former president recorded saying:

“I did try and fuck her. She was married…I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there…When you’re a star, they let you do it…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Then again, perhaps not:(

Unpublished, but not Unsent v5

Photo by Jacqueline Day on Unsplash

Dear Editor,

November 4th, 2020 is turning out to feel nightmarishly like November 9th, 2016. In putting my finger on what bothers me most, it’s this - in 2016, I naively asked myself, “in 1933, what would I have done, as a German citizen, in Nazi Germany?” My answer was, I *hoped, that I would have condemned Nazi supporters, be they family, friends, or colleagues. So that’s what I did in 2016. I ended long-term friendships with trump supporters I have known since preschool, fought rabidly with Republican family members, and ended business relationships with Republican professionals.

In 2020, the vitriol escalated; my own parents have swung to the right-wing and I feel utterly abandoned. As a social entrepreneur, I’m egotistical enough to feel especially offended when loved ones do not trust my instinct about trump and the Republicans. Haven’t I spent my entire career practicing fair trade; haven’t I, at the very least, earned the right to be vouched for when it comes to identifying pretty obvious injustice? [I wish it was that simple…]

But faced with another election loss, in order to survive another four years worrying about progressive ideals being demonized by fox news, I will need to find another way. I will not change what I am fighting for, but HOW I fight might have to change.

What’s most difficult is discerning the legitimacy of the threat. I want to believe that I would have stood up to a Nazi neighbor. But I’m tired of losing friends. How, I wonder, have four long years of trump’s compulsive lying not made Republican voters them ask themselves: “in 1933, what would I have done, as a German citizen, in Nazi Germany?”

Unpublished, but not Unsent v4

Dear Editor,

If your readers are worried about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court, they should be. And if your readers marched in protest on October 17th, 2020, I’d like to thank them for marching for me. It’s been simpler for me to accept what Barrett’s appointment will mean while still fighting mightily to protect the rights we will lose, as best I know how. Every day, EVERY DAY, I think of those six-year-olds shot in Sandy Hook; yet federal protection of the Second Amendment will be strengthened. Every day I think of the words of Maxine Waters as she spoke them at the 2017 Women’s Convention in Detroit:

“Keep your hands off our backs and our goddamn bodies!”

Yet federal protection for reproductive rights will be overturned. I’d like to tell your readers: This is happening on our watch.

Dr. Willie Parker notes:

“Liberals may hear about [anti-abortion] laws enacted elsewhere, in states where they are not likely to live, that require counseling and waiting periods, widened hallways and hospital admitting privileges, and shrug...From the relative safety of the blue states, voters who support abortion rights can be insulated from the devastating impact new [anti-abortion] laws make on women’s lives.”

I’d like to tell your readers: Do not let this happen to you. Barrett’s appointment means we will need to spend the next forty+ years fighting everyday to keep from losing the basic rights our mothers procured for us. If you don’t or can’t remember life before Roe v. Wade, read “The Story of Jane, the Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” by Laura Kaplan. Roe v. Wade stated that abortion is a medical decision to be made by a woman and her doctor. That’s all it protects, and the right to that decision is what Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and especially Barrett, are going to take away from you.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v3

Photo of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford giving testimony

Dear Editor,

In the days of my youth the phrase we used for what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified to experiencing at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh was “date rape.” Most of the girls I knew who suffered date rape did so as members of a church youth group and in fact, the date rapists were usually boys in the same church youth group. Date rape meant three things: 1) you knew the assailant, but not well; 2) you blamed yourself for what happened; and 3) you didn’t mention it. Except word always got out, because generally the girl who’d been date raped and then had to keep silent about it would be traumatized just enough to make a half-hearted suicide attempt before recovering more fully (if that’s possible).

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018, throughout Dr. Ford’s testimony, many American women recognized that with Kavanaugh’s inevitable appointment, the same type of man capable of committing date-rape with which so many women are familiar - that can result in a forced pregnancy - would be the very same man responsible for criminalizing abortion, thus removing choice on both ends of the conception spectrum. It was simply too much to bear. It still is.

Dr. Willie Parker notes: “If a woman is not in control of her fertility, she is not in control of her life.” Date-rape is (sadly) common enough, even still, and in plenty of instances a woman becomes pregnant without choosing to do so. That has been the case since time immemorial; abortion access gave her back some control. With Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment, you can bet we’re one step closer to losing it, at the federal level, for good.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v2

Dear Editor.

I am angry. I have been angry since Election Day 2016. It’s amazing to me that this anger has ceased to subside; it’s a little like grief in that way, it simply burns true day after day. I’m angry that as a working mom I have to dedicate any spare time to the Resistance, which means, as an introvert, having to spend my Saturday afternoons in anguish, phone banking for Democrats. I am especially angry about the fear that drives my anger to exhibit itself in unexpected ways, like a crying-jag in public. And I am not alone. I can name scores of other women, who, like me, are angry. These women are changed, some (you’d be surprised how many) have quit their jobs to join the Resistance, to lead it. These women have been transformed into activists.

Now you might ask, why does this matter? What has the transformation wrought? I can tell you this, these women are living differently, every spare moment (and just ask a woman how carefully life must be ordered to allow for a spare moment) is spent educating themselves about this current political reality and using the activism tools they have created to fight back, run for office and broaden the progressive, liberal ideals with which they were raised. I am angry, and I know now that I should have been angry LONG before the 2016 election. The interesting thing about this anger is that it has birthed not violence, but generosity and action. It is a wellspring of motivation that these women have used to create communities.

Today when I realized that being in the “Resistance” actually just means taking part in our democracy, my anger suddenly subsided a bit. I’m thankful to have been forced to participate and take action, to fundraise and phonebank for Democratic candidates who will defend progressive politics. Yes, I am still angry that a conservative Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade; but I am grateful, finally, to have learned the hard way the value of taking part. Taking part IS the same as fighting for. And I will never stop, taking part.

I hope you won’t either.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v1

In September of 2020, I began writing a series of Letters to the Editor of the New York Times, which I submit, but which are, needless to say, never published. The letters are lamentations, mainly, on dealing with the consequences of, as I saw it originally, a post-trump reality. What I’ve learned since is that what, for me, was “post-trump”, was just normal, everyday life for other people.

I write these letters to self-soothe, whenever my Current Affairs anxiety needs leveling.

Dear Editor,

When I was teenager, about the age a mother-daughter relationship is just beginning to transform into a friendship, my mother told me a story she’d told many times before, but with a new twist.

When she became pregnant with me in her late twenties, she was ecstatic. My parents were married but their relationship was rocky and she wasn’t sure where he stood on the subject. So she made an appointment with a doctor to listen and learn more about abortion. This was 1975, only two years after Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now an option for her, a freedom she had the right to exercise. “I wanted to have you,” she told me, “but I wanted your father to choose you, too.”

He did, and I was born. But it was the abortion right that helped my parents commit to having a family. When it came time to have my own family, I felt honored to access the same right to a safe, legal abortion as my mother. I, too, did not exercise it and now have a beautiful daughter.

The terrible thing is, I desperately wanted to have more children but after battling endometriosis was unable to conceive a second time. And at the same time I lie awake at night drenched in fear that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment and Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death will destroy the one freedom that made my family possible. The right to an abortion did for my family what it was supposed to, it allowed me to choose to have a family. How can I now be expected to parent a daughter knowing she will not have that same right? I already carry with me the painful burden of unfulfilled longing for more children; now I must brace myself to say goodbye to my daughter’s right, as a woman, to seek an abortion and, terrified for her future, carry that burden too.