There have been too many tears recently
The past five days have been Tear Central around here, and that's really unusual for me. It takes a hell of a lot to make me cry, and I resist it with every cell in my body. So to have four separate bawling sessions over the past five days is extremely out of the ordinary.
I actually don't remember what kicked off the first crying session, but I know what started the last three. The first was because I read in a friend's journal about some bad experiences she had had, and I was standing at the kitchen counter trying to make dinner and mulling it over. I couldn't fight off the tears, and Gavin wandered into the kitchen shortly after, to do Quality Control. (That's what we call it when he and/or his brother eat bits of food while I'm preparing it, and then they tell me if the ingredients taste good. They take the job very seriously.) He stared at me (the sight of me crying is not one he sees often) and then asked, "Why're you crying, Mama?"
"I'm crying because one of my friends got raped," I said. He asked the obvious question - what's rape? I said, "You remember how sex works, right? Like in Where Did I Come From? How a man puts his penis or another body part inside another person?" I waited until he nodded, then said, "Well, rape is when the other person doesn't want him to put his penis or fingers or other part of his body inside them, and he does it anyway even though they don't want him to." (Yes, I know that's a gross oversimplification of sex, and also of rape. He's only five years old, I have to start with the basics.)
He thought it over and said, "That's not nice at all. He shouldn't do that."
And I looked at my son and thought about the fact that he is growing up in a rape culture. He's growing up in a culture where 1/3 of college-age boys don't have any problems telling a surveyor that having sex with a woman who is passed out drunk isn't rape. He's growing up in a culture where the courts keep telling women over and over and over that they did something to bring it on themselves. He's growing up in a culture where celebrities publicly support another celebrity who drugged and raped a 13-year-old, and say that that "isn't rape-rape". He's growing up in a culture that believes that the only real rape is when a stranger jumps out of the bushes and holds you down with a knife to your throat - and even then, you better not ask him to put on a condom, and you better struggle, and you better be in a good area of town, and you better not be a sex worker or promiscuous, and you better not be wearing anything less than full-body armor. He's growing up in a culture that is teaching him each and every day that women are disposable. I thought about the fact that almost none of us talk to our children about rape, especially our boy children. And this is how we end up with a society where one in three college-age boys doesn't have a fucking clue what rape is, and some of those boys will do it without ever acknowledging the truth of what they're doing.
I got down on his level and looked him in the eyes and said, "No, they shouldn't. But it happens, and it happens a lot. Mama has three friends - no, wait, five friends - no, seven friends," and I could feel my heart sinking as more and more names popped into my head, "nine friends," and I stopped counting there even though I knew there are more, "who have been raped. And honey, you need to understand this. This is so important. Someday you're going to grow up, and you're going to want to put your penis inside other people. And that's fine, as long as they say yes and they mean it. But sometimes they'll say no, and you have to stop right then, because otherwise it's rape. And sometimes they want to say no, but they won't say no. Sometimes they won't say no because maybe they're scared to say no, or they might be sick and not thinking well because they drank alcohol, or they might feel badly about themselves and believe they deserve to have bad things happen to them, so they won't say no even though they want to. And if you have sex with someone when they don't want you to, even if they don't say no, it's still rape. It isn't enough for them to be quiet. Being silent is not the same thing as saying yes. They have to say yes, and they have to mean it, and it's your job to make sure that they really want to."
He said seriously, "Okay, Mama."
"I love you," I said, and hugged him, then got up and offered him some food for testing.
He ate it, pronounced it good, and then ran back to the living room to play Super Mario Galaxy. And I knew that just as with racism, homophobia, etc., this is only the first of so many conversations we're going to have to have as he grows up. It makes me ache inside to know that I have to raise my children explicitly not to rape people. But the alternative - letting him just absorb all the messages from the media, his friends, his culture - is part of why we're in the rape culture that we're in. It's part of why there's so many rape apologists (and yes, there's some of you on my FL) and people who would rather blame the victim for what they didn't do, than blame the rapist for what they did do.
(And if anyone feels like getting into any rape apologetics in the comments? I swear to you I don't care how long you have been on my FL, I don't care if we're friends in real life, I will delete comments and kick you off my FL with extreme prejudice.)
So that was the first crying episode. I hadn't written about it until now because I've still been processing it.
The second two were today. I was napping with Connor this afternoon and I had a dream. In my dream he was terminally ill, and it was like this horrible reversal of preparing for his homebirth; we were walking through a shopping center, picking out items that we needed to prepare for his death at home. New sheets for his bed, new bucket for vomiting, item after item. We came home and I made his bed with the new sheets, then lay down with him in the bed and held him in my arms. I sang to him and fought off my tears, wanting to stay calm so I didn't scare him, while I waited for his last breath.
I woke up in tears, and got out of bed fast so I didn't wake him with my sobbing. I headed out to the kitchen and stood in the kitchen, still crying, waiting for the intensity of it to subside. Frolic came into the kitchen and I told him about the dream (in a whisper, since Gavin was in the living room and he's been asking questions about death recently; he knows old people die, but he doesn't know that children can die, and I don't want him to know that until it's absolutely necessary, which hopefully won't be for years yet). Frolic held me for a little bit while I cried, and slowly it subsided.
Of course tonight I was lying in bed with Connor again, nursing him and singing him to sleep, my arms around his twitchy little frame, and the space between my lips and chin pressed against the top of his head. Oftentimes I'm able to avoid thinking about how ephemeral my children are, but this was not one of those nights. Finally he was asleep but I still didn't want to leave him (all the mothers know of those nights, when you just want to hold them close for another minute, another minute, another minute), so I put on my iPod and lay there in the dark, holding him. The tears kept threatening, but I was doing a good job at keeping the tears away. Then Tori Amos's "Gold Dust" came on and that was that. It's a song about the preciousness of all these moments, of how they go through your hands and then looking back you know how much they mattered and how quickly they were over. She wrote it when her own daughter was small and that's part of what it's about, the poignancy of these tiny little lives. So I sobbed my way through that song. And then I left (once again scared of waking Connor if I stayed in bed) and came out to the living room and wrote this post, and I sobbed the whole way through that too. (In other words, I've cried for about an hour straight.)
For goodness sake, enough. At this rate I'm going to get dehydrated, and my throat is aching like hell. I'm going to go play Animal Crossing and try to turn my brain off.
I actually don't remember what kicked off the first crying session, but I know what started the last three. The first was because I read in a friend's journal about some bad experiences she had had, and I was standing at the kitchen counter trying to make dinner and mulling it over. I couldn't fight off the tears, and Gavin wandered into the kitchen shortly after, to do Quality Control. (That's what we call it when he and/or his brother eat bits of food while I'm preparing it, and then they tell me if the ingredients taste good. They take the job very seriously.) He stared at me (the sight of me crying is not one he sees often) and then asked, "Why're you crying, Mama?"
"I'm crying because one of my friends got raped," I said. He asked the obvious question - what's rape? I said, "You remember how sex works, right? Like in Where Did I Come From? How a man puts his penis or another body part inside another person?" I waited until he nodded, then said, "Well, rape is when the other person doesn't want him to put his penis or fingers or other part of his body inside them, and he does it anyway even though they don't want him to." (Yes, I know that's a gross oversimplification of sex, and also of rape. He's only five years old, I have to start with the basics.)
He thought it over and said, "That's not nice at all. He shouldn't do that."
And I looked at my son and thought about the fact that he is growing up in a rape culture. He's growing up in a culture where 1/3 of college-age boys don't have any problems telling a surveyor that having sex with a woman who is passed out drunk isn't rape. He's growing up in a culture where the courts keep telling women over and over and over that they did something to bring it on themselves. He's growing up in a culture where celebrities publicly support another celebrity who drugged and raped a 13-year-old, and say that that "isn't rape-rape". He's growing up in a culture that believes that the only real rape is when a stranger jumps out of the bushes and holds you down with a knife to your throat - and even then, you better not ask him to put on a condom, and you better struggle, and you better be in a good area of town, and you better not be a sex worker or promiscuous, and you better not be wearing anything less than full-body armor. He's growing up in a culture that is teaching him each and every day that women are disposable. I thought about the fact that almost none of us talk to our children about rape, especially our boy children. And this is how we end up with a society where one in three college-age boys doesn't have a fucking clue what rape is, and some of those boys will do it without ever acknowledging the truth of what they're doing.
I got down on his level and looked him in the eyes and said, "No, they shouldn't. But it happens, and it happens a lot. Mama has three friends - no, wait, five friends - no, seven friends," and I could feel my heart sinking as more and more names popped into my head, "nine friends," and I stopped counting there even though I knew there are more, "who have been raped. And honey, you need to understand this. This is so important. Someday you're going to grow up, and you're going to want to put your penis inside other people. And that's fine, as long as they say yes and they mean it. But sometimes they'll say no, and you have to stop right then, because otherwise it's rape. And sometimes they want to say no, but they won't say no. Sometimes they won't say no because maybe they're scared to say no, or they might be sick and not thinking well because they drank alcohol, or they might feel badly about themselves and believe they deserve to have bad things happen to them, so they won't say no even though they want to. And if you have sex with someone when they don't want you to, even if they don't say no, it's still rape. It isn't enough for them to be quiet. Being silent is not the same thing as saying yes. They have to say yes, and they have to mean it, and it's your job to make sure that they really want to."
He said seriously, "Okay, Mama."
"I love you," I said, and hugged him, then got up and offered him some food for testing.
He ate it, pronounced it good, and then ran back to the living room to play Super Mario Galaxy. And I knew that just as with racism, homophobia, etc., this is only the first of so many conversations we're going to have to have as he grows up. It makes me ache inside to know that I have to raise my children explicitly not to rape people. But the alternative - letting him just absorb all the messages from the media, his friends, his culture - is part of why we're in the rape culture that we're in. It's part of why there's so many rape apologists (and yes, there's some of you on my FL) and people who would rather blame the victim for what they didn't do, than blame the rapist for what they did do.
(And if anyone feels like getting into any rape apologetics in the comments? I swear to you I don't care how long you have been on my FL, I don't care if we're friends in real life, I will delete comments and kick you off my FL with extreme prejudice.)
So that was the first crying episode. I hadn't written about it until now because I've still been processing it.
The second two were today. I was napping with Connor this afternoon and I had a dream. In my dream he was terminally ill, and it was like this horrible reversal of preparing for his homebirth; we were walking through a shopping center, picking out items that we needed to prepare for his death at home. New sheets for his bed, new bucket for vomiting, item after item. We came home and I made his bed with the new sheets, then lay down with him in the bed and held him in my arms. I sang to him and fought off my tears, wanting to stay calm so I didn't scare him, while I waited for his last breath.
I woke up in tears, and got out of bed fast so I didn't wake him with my sobbing. I headed out to the kitchen and stood in the kitchen, still crying, waiting for the intensity of it to subside. Frolic came into the kitchen and I told him about the dream (in a whisper, since Gavin was in the living room and he's been asking questions about death recently; he knows old people die, but he doesn't know that children can die, and I don't want him to know that until it's absolutely necessary, which hopefully won't be for years yet). Frolic held me for a little bit while I cried, and slowly it subsided.
Of course tonight I was lying in bed with Connor again, nursing him and singing him to sleep, my arms around his twitchy little frame, and the space between my lips and chin pressed against the top of his head. Oftentimes I'm able to avoid thinking about how ephemeral my children are, but this was not one of those nights. Finally he was asleep but I still didn't want to leave him (all the mothers know of those nights, when you just want to hold them close for another minute, another minute, another minute), so I put on my iPod and lay there in the dark, holding him. The tears kept threatening, but I was doing a good job at keeping the tears away. Then Tori Amos's "Gold Dust" came on and that was that. It's a song about the preciousness of all these moments, of how they go through your hands and then looking back you know how much they mattered and how quickly they were over. She wrote it when her own daughter was small and that's part of what it's about, the poignancy of these tiny little lives. So I sobbed my way through that song. And then I left (once again scared of waking Connor if I stayed in bed) and came out to the living room and wrote this post, and I sobbed the whole way through that too. (In other words, I've cried for about an hour straight.)
For goodness sake, enough. At this rate I'm going to get dehydrated, and my throat is aching like hell. I'm going to go play Animal Crossing and try to turn my brain off.
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