Get A Life

She had one. That, I remember for sure. She may have had two, in all. “Dilation and curettement” was the term she shared.

Mom was linguistically driven. She only spoke English but she spoke it lyrically, voluminously, in great, wheeling flights that spanned from Chaucer to the Kennedy speeches, incorporating medical and sociological and military and rockabilly and corporate and farming jargon along the way. She started reading to us in utero, and never stopped with any of us until our noses were buried into our own chosen texts. Even then, within my mother’s vicinity, vivid, discursive conversations threatened to flame up like sunbreaks in July.

So of course she explained it to us with the medical term du jour, and in as much or more detail than our little brains could manage. It had been a miscarriage, and then a trip to the hospital, with attendance by a physician.

Mom had her narrative and, as in many broods, hers was our primary skein of family lore. She told us what she felt we should know, but of course you don’t tell your kids everything.

Eventually, we knew that she’d been pregnant at least five times in five-and-a-half years, finally producing the four children — two girls and two boys — that our father demanded.

And at least one miscarriage.

Eventually, we knew that Dad assumed her gynecologist (unusually, a woman) was a lesbian, and that he’d tried to fire that doctor several times.

She performed the D&C.

Eventually, we knew that Dad hadn’t only started beating Mom after she filed for divorce, or after he staked out a pied-à-terre for his erstwhile assistant, now mistress. We were middle-aged before we knew he’d been smacking her around since before they were engaged.

It is not for me to say why my mother obtained her marriage license. It is not for me to speculate why she had her D&C, but perhaps she’ll forgive me enumerating possibilities.

The story goes, she was cleaning up a routine miscarriage. They are astoundingly common. Around one in eight known pregnancies ends in miscarriage, and this doesn’t include the many pregnancies that miscarry before a woman even knows she’s carrying. That’s five weeks until a heavy period, and you move right along.

Could have been that.

Our father, who art in whatever form the afterlife takes, also could have hit her just wrong, or just right. I’m not going to look up the statistics on that. You probably shouldn’t, either. I’ve been knowing something that you didn’t know, which is that he left scars on my sister’s chin and broke mine. Thick of bone and un-fragile, the man was mighty proud of his backhand.

While that possibility is one I dislike contemplating, ignoring it seems naive.

She could possibly have had an affair. Seems unlikely, but people are complicated and my parents had rich, complex lives before I met either of them. Maybe she accepted a ride home from the wrong bachelor driver while Dad was on Eniwetok, catching genital warts and testing Agent Orange from a weirdly sky-camouflaged Albatross HU-16, and ended up in an encounter she couldn’t get out of.

She was a feisty redhead, but she wasn’t big.

Mom may also have made a decision, one that felt as urgently necessary as it was desperate. Maybe she was already planning to re-shape her life.

In honesty, she acknowledged nothing like this to me and it’s surely too late to ask her now, but her gynecologist was loyal and realistic. It would not be many more years before Mom did take the risky leap into single motherhood. It must have been worth her life, because that is what he threatened, my father. His blood runs through me, still disputatious. Still unimpressed by his scion and namesake.

But Dad already had his say. He always got it, and it’s Mom who deserves hers now, and you can help.

There are many who believe that women should be, like dogs and children, attractive, competent and well-groomed; also substantially silent and submissive. Useful, pettable, and out of the way. They don’t need to be making any big decisions on their own.

An entire political party cleaves to that nonsense. Lately, they’ve come all the way out of the closet. It’s a general article of faith in today’s GOP (and pretty much nowhere else in America) that women seeking abortions are slutty, adulterous murder bitches. It’s a heady, intoxicating patriarchy with hints of cherry, leather, and gleeful brutality.

In places where Republicans accrue sufficient power, they seek to criminalize abortion so tightly that every miscarriage is scrutinized to find the next woman who can be charged with murder for tripping on the stairs.

In Texas, “pro-life” politicians want to institute the death penalty for women who abort. Will spontaneous abortion be a defense? Probably not an affirmative one. Those who unwittingly bleed early fetuses into their toilets will be guilty until proven innocent.



That’s not hyperbole. Attend to their talking points. Watch the bills that are pushed, and the cases that are brought. Hard-right Republicans believe (or at least insist) that every abortion is murder, and fully intend to punish them that way.

Under such laws, it wouldn’t have mattered why my mother, halfway through delivering a generous litter of four, had miscarried. Whether it was spontaneous, intentional, or violently inflicted by an abusive spouse, the hand of the law would have flattened her harder than Dad could.

That certainly would have prevented the pregnancies which resulted in my little brother and sister. In the most lurid fever dreams of righty-tighty punishment fetishists it would have ended her life, leaving my elder sister and I to be raised by Dad.



Somebody explain to me how that’s “pro-life.”

“Life” implies “living.” These punishment-obsessed authoritarians aren’t interested in life. Their goal is controlling others through the instigation and exploitation of fear and rage.

 They leverage weak-minded, reactive drones to raise themselves into power.

There is a big, loud man running for President of the United States right now. He shares recognizable characteristics with my father that include risky entrepreneurialism, ceremonial patriotism from the rear, and physical abuse of women.

That man, red of cap and orange of cheek, takes personal pride in having destroyed the right to abortion. That man, a law and order felon, believes there has to be “some form of punishment” for women who get abortions.

He is not volunteering to punish himself for his involvement in abortions. He’s not the slut here!

Understand that I’m reluctant to speak for my mother. She is no longer alive to speak for herself, and I am loathe to risk embarrassing her. However, she and I wholeheartedly, unequivocally agreed that the last thing our society needs to inflict on women under duress is more creative forms of punishment.

This is a nominally free country, for now. You can do what you want, and tell yourself any story you want. Maybe you think you’re voting the economy. Maybe he’s “not really a racist” (just likes to lunch with them). Maybe you think Kamala is a flip-flopper, ignoring the Republican candidate who used to be a vocally pro-abortion Democrat.



But I’m voting for the candidate who will free my mother from pestering me in my dreams. The odds were stacked against her, but Mom was smart and tough. Most women are.



Vote with them. Vote for them.

Tell ’em Mom sent you.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

–Joshua 24:14-15