Bad Mothers

I saw the movie Precious this past Thursday with Nick. I came out of the theatre sobbing and when I calmed down enough to tell Nick that yes, the performances were stunning and powerful, but it was my resemblance to Precious, the wounded child, that made me so sad, my experience of childhood in an upper middle class white family of extremely attractive people, where I was a sexual object at six for my mother's husband, my adoptive father, son of a well known surgeon, member of the Country Club, where no one saw the pain, the isolation, the destruction going on in full view of everyone. Nothing ever disturbed my families picture perfect outward appearance, but my parents pathology certainly did create madness in me. They did pass it on. I was not impregnated by my father, but if I had been, my grandfather would have quietly made that little problem go away. It was an educational opportunity that got me out of my family home when I was seventeen, a bit like Precious, only I got to skip my senior year of high school and go to the University of Utah and live in the dorms. Otherwise I'd have probably been a run-away living on the streets of San Francisco.

A lot of men think the stories of my childhood are hyperbolic and too lurid to be believable. I promise you that when I was in group therapy in Santa Barbara in a group of fifteen women who all had been sexually abused as children, some of us had children who had also been sexually abused, we were all white. Some of us were the well educated progeny of well off parents, but the cost to each of us had been sanity, safety, any sence of security, a profound saddness, and a series of suicide attempts. Many of these women had lives far more brutal than mine, yet we all felt worthless.

I'm writing a novel about the life of one such woman. You know what they say: write about what you know. So that's what I'm doing. If writing my story makes only one woman feel less alone, I'll feel like a success.

A woman I greatly admire, Melissa Harris Lacewell, has written an article for The Nation called Bad Black Mothers. I think it's important to our understanding of each other that we pay close attention to all these stories. The one thing they all have in common is the bad or absent father who is never mentioned, never blamed for the aftermath, never suffers the real consequences for the destruction he causes. No, we as a society blame the mother and/or the child. More of our famous Family Values.

Family Values

Every time I hear someone on the Right claim that their political party is all about “Family Values,” I want to scream, “Whose Family?” Certainly not mine. Family Values is “Christian” code for “Exclusion.” Like “Pro-Life” is code for “Anti-Choice.” Embedded in the code of “Family Values” is the idea that there is only one “right” kind of family.

Since the 1950’s the family has undergone radical change. We are mobile and very often live far from extended families. There are now blended families, which have evolved over the past fifty some years, and now children may have more than one “mother” or “father.” Children today may have more than two sets of grandparents. They may have aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews from marriages that ended in divorce and began anew with new marriages to people who already had children from their past marriages. It is a little like the polygamist marriages so common in Mormonism. After awhile it becomes difficult to sort out who is a cousin or an aunt or a niece to whom. And so it seems to me that “Family Values” is a meaningless term, merely code for “no marriage benefits for gay couples.” I don’t know a single family today, with it’s multiple marriages, and all the children raised in these temporary marriages, that does not have at least one gay child within it. This fact implies that we don’t love all our children equally. That some of our children do not deserve the legal rights and privileges that our other children deserve. And this is a Christian value? If it is, then Christianity has undergone the same kind of radical shift in “values” that is apparent in all families.

Fundamentalist Christians believe the word of God, as set down in the Bible, is absolutely the “Truth.” If this line of thinking is taken to it’s logical conclusion, we would be stoning adulterers, we would be literally taking an eye for an eye. I would be able to say to any “Christian” who complains about the content of our mass media, “If thine eyes offend thee, pluck them out,” and would have a reasonable expectation that there would be a lot of one eyed “Christians” walking around out there. Women are exhorted from almost every pulpit in the land to “obey” their husbands, who are the moral authority, the rulers of their families. They seem to believe that it is their right (these old white men) to take away my rights as well a the legal rights of every female and gay person. They are about to strip our reproductive rights in the guise of Healthcare Reform. The Stupak Amendment and the Nelson Amendment are designed to make it impossible for women to make the choice to terminate a pregnancy. This has been a legal right since Roe versus Wade. If they succeed in taking away my rights as a woman, then they can take away your rights as an African American, and your rights as a Latin American, and your rights as a………. Where will this end? It will end in fascism. We will have no rights at all.