I fought. I am a warrior. I had seen what happens: bags under the eyes, cancer of the feminine parts, destroyed children, reduced to poverty, dejected, dehumanized, used like a rag and thrown away. The messy hair, the attempts to cover it up with makeup, the sneakers and jeans, the secondhand dress clothes and relatives looking down their noses. The people I’d encounter, walking the earth, who did not know what I once was. Exploited, abused, humiliated, abandoned, taken advantage of. An endless supply of life-support for children or the ex, being milked, bled, until a bitter and untimely death as a withered up sow. I had said Fuck No, Not Me, Not Them (my children).
I had seen it coming. Like a canary in the mine, I screamed. I screamed, screeched, bellowed, implored, kindly whispered, spoke loudly, spoke calmly, put my bright eyes and yellow plumage before everyone and every listener, kindly or angrily; like blind bandits they kept going forward with their mission of selfish destruction and got what was “theirs” while the world around us all was actually imploding. They blazed, consumed in an explosion of coal and fury, but didn’t care. They didn’t believe me.
I had seen it coming, but they didn’t care. Willfully, they raped me. They plowed me. I was raked, head to toe, womb to grain, girlhood to crone-hood,. They laughed at me. They snapped in my face and called me crazy. I bit, clawed, roared, screamed, played their game as a powerful adversary, flowed like water and occasionally, stung like a bee. And was reduced, at the end, to the same fate as the millions: withered and battered into submission. The bags under my eyes, the inability for my brain to string successive thoughts together, the loss of patience and grace with my children, kindness. The sucking away of sweetness.
And the fallout, the damage, what is lost forever: light, functionality, ease, gentle peace like a rock standing by a river, like the inside of a solid mountain, one which eases itself kindly to carving caves and pathways when a gentle hand is poised on co-habitation, not irresponsible pillage. As a mother, the mountain can shelter and supply us; if we carve out her insides hastily and carelessly, she is reduced to collapsing, taking all of us and the strong foundation she has provided.
The fallout, the damage, what is lost forever, is childhood and the results of a good mother’s love. Who would want that.
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