Tag Archives: date rape

Jun6

And Then There Were #Haters

Posted on June 6, 2015 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

I hope this is my last blog post / comment on the Caitlin (neé Bruce) Jenner situation.

Of course there are haters. We do not live in a utopian world: judgementalism and fear have done an excellent job of setting up a premise and creating a platform from which to spout vitriol and puke deep self-loathing and fears, cloaked in hate.

Think about it this way: if you felt good about yourself, felt secure about your prospects, felt happy or content with your life, and felt as though you’ve done everything you can to create a positive environment for yourself (so, ultimately, you’ve done away with all greed, envy, reactivity and shame; and now, you fart rainbows and butterflies) and others, then why would you hate on anyone who decides to do whatever that person wants to its own body?

You wouldn’t.

You’d say, “not for me, but more power to you.”

Not, “the world is a mess and what has happened to us?”

I’ve got news for you: people have been cross dressing, with intention and fear for their lives, for millennia. Has it ever hurt you, o hater, before? Has the cross dresser or transgender or whomever shown up at your senate confirmation hearing for installation as the most balanced, articulate, and rational hater on Earth and said,

“NO NO NO!!! GOOD SENATORS AND STATESMEN! DO NOT PASS THIS INDIVIDUAL AS NOMINATED! HE HAS FEAR IN HIS HEART AND I AM HERE TO PROVE IT! STRIP HIM OF HIS MANHOOD! SHOW HIM HOW DAAAAAAAAANGEERRRRRRROUS I AM TO HIM…. I WILL THWART HIS EVERY EFFORT TO BUY GASOLINE FOR HIS CAR, OR AMMUNITION FOR HIS GUN, OR MATCHES FOR HIS CIGARETTES, OR BEER FOR HIS MAN ‘FRIDGE … BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT I DO… BECAUSE I AM DAAAAAAAAAANGEERRRROUS… boooowhoooohaaaahahaaaahaaaa…”

Get over y’damnselves. Look in the mirror.

I will say it again: I care about the kids in this situation. I care about the kids in all situations where the adults have let fear and apathy and narcissism run themselves freakin’ rampant. Where those adults lose all control of themselves and their grounding. Where the adults lie, and hide, and obfuscate, and deny, and deflect, and project, and displace all their OWN self-shit on to their kids. Where the kids are left holding the bag for the adult who is really, truly, deeply, still a child deep, deep, deep inside. Bruce Jenner hid his truth from his children.

I’m not just talking about the transgender feelings, I’m talking about his PLANS to have surgeries. That tactical and strategic side to all of this. The dude was a freakin’ world-class athlete: he KNOWS all about strategy and execution. It’s like when my dad asks me to find out things for him: he’s an investigative journalist for crying’ out loud…

Bruce never told them. He planned it all along; logistics for this takes months to line up. Months, perhaps years of psychotherapy has to be experienced and assessed before one gets the medical clearance to begin looking into procedures. Bruce hid his truth and only when asked — the kids HAD TO ASK THE RIGHT WORDS IN THE RIGHT WAY — did he pout, look down, and while fiddling with his shirt, say in a very non-sportscaster voice, “mmmm, yeah.”

Much as like how a kid would admit to hitting a baseball into a neighbor’s window.

“But you should’ve seen the hit! It was aMAZing, Mom…”

Bruce has been acting on id impulse for a very long time. See me. Watch me. Listen to me. See me. SEEEEEEEEE MEEEEEEEEE!

Where the adult is acting ONLY ON ID, where the id is in control.

When the id is in control, it’s dessert all the time. Except for you. Just me. That’s my teddy bear. Get your own. Your teddy bear is ugly. I don’t want to watch that show, idiots like that show. I want to watch this. Now. No, now. NOW.

Ids are freakin’ tenacious and selfish motherfuckers. (Sorry.) And ids can rationalize anything. Count on it.

So in my estimation, we have ids running the media and ids hating on others.

The haters have to hate, lest they sit with themselves. It’s all about projection, peeps. They feel so alone.

What gets me the most in this, is the people out there who are FREAKING out and saying that Bruce has become a woman.

No.

I don’t care if Bruce had his genitalia removed, enhanced, fucked with … there is NOTHING that will turn Caitlin (neé Bruce) into a “woman.”

It’s too late for that. There is and never was a uterus. There are no ovaries. There are no eggs. There were no periods. There were no breast sprouts. There was no breast growth (and that pain! OY!). The hips didn’t widen and curve. There were no stretch marks. There were no girls at school who were shitty to him and slut-shaming and date-rape. There was no ambivalence about growing INTO a woman, no flood of questions about “WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING TO ME????” There were no pregnancy scares or losses. The hormones were never there natively. It’s simply not possible. And Caitlin’s body is 65 years old. So… menopause!! Bruce missed all the windows.

Maybe it’s semantics.

“Female…”? Same point as two paragraphs above.

But… guess what?

None of this matters! How much of what you do is because you are male or female? Really? In the entire existence of your day, do you drink your coffee in a manly way? What about when you scratch your butt or go for your car keys, do you feel especially gender-identified?

Hmmm, Chet. That wasn’t quite manly enough just now, when you pressed the key fob to unlock your Lincoln. It didn’t feel right to our focus group. Let’s try that again. From the doorway, as you step out into the sunlight. Think, ‘How would John Wayne do this?’

But, y’know keep that façade, that shit up, because, really, that’s what matters. It matters HOW you order your grande Americano.

Sally… ? It is Sally, right? Hon, we need to do this again. You didn’t flush the toilet femininely enough. It’s causing all sorts of confusion for us. We need you to go back in, pee, and when you flush, think, ‘How would Joan of Mad Men, not Arc, do this?’

It matters HOW you sit at the steering wheel or periscope because that defines your sexuality. It does. And people are watching. They are. Just now. Yup.

Female. Male. Woman. Man. Metrosexual. Lumber-sexual. Foxy. Hawt.

Gah. These are all “words” and “brands” and “identifiers” we all have created as a construct in order to assign place, and rank, and meaning to our lives. I happen to dig them. I am a word person. But I don’t use them as weapons.

That’s easy for you to say, Molly. Your kids are ____ and ____ and you’re all set.

Well, no. It’s not like that. And you can bet your ass that if one of them came home and said to me, “Mom, I want to be a woman…” I’d likely flip out. The fact is, though, that I would say to him what I said above: no ovaries, no female. It’s not happening, authentically, for you. You can play dress-up and do the façade thing all you want, but biologically and energetically, well, it’s going to be very challenging. Hell, I don’t know what being a woman is. This shit just happens. I don’t know if I’m “doing” it right.

I maintain my position in the first post I wrote about this: Caitlin is Caitlin. And what the hell does it change in your personal life? Nothing. Unless you’re Caitlin, or Caitlin’s (neé Bruce) children. And even to them, it’s their own versions of affect.

Thank God, we are all different versions of each other. I can’t experience what you’re experiencing and you can’t have mine — even if we experience the same thing at the same time, we PROCESS it differently. We might have the same shoe size, but the shoes will fit us differently. And no shoe is the same. I don’t care what you say: they’re not. There is a bubble in the sole of one whereas there is none in the other. A fiber on one is not the same on the other.

THAT’S HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE.

Take comfort in that. (Sorry, China.)

When this story broke, and I saw all the comments flying around, especially the flip and glib ones, I said to my oldest son, “Don’t look now, America, but you’re about to go existential on yourselves… Welcome to the rabbit hole, strap in…”

Haters ‘gonna hate. Let ’em. They need to be seen too. They feel left out. Just don’t give a toot.

Take a deep breath, and sigh it out.

rest.

Take another one, deeper this time… sigh it out.

rest.

And repeat a third time…. BIG SIGH.

Let that crap go. It’s not yours. None of this has anything to do with you.

The world is not ending over this. Maybe it’s just starting! Ha! Ever thought of that? There are so many other situations which desperately need our enthusiasm and energy: cancer, racism, terrorism, world hunger, bad haircuts….

You still have to pay your taxes and make dinner and do the dishes… life goes on. With or with out you, life goes on.

Yup. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Thank you.

May12

No Ordinary Day

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

Standard

So today, I got more than I gave and I gave a lot. I received more than I could ever hope to provide.

We talk in mysteries sometimes, about how “the universe provides.” How things work out, no matter what, even if the end result (so far) is not what we would have preferred. We talk about being “less-than” or “good enough” or “better than we deserve to be.”

Today, I was a moth, drawn to the inextinguishable flame of Survivor-hood.

Today, I participated, on some infinitesimal scale, in a program to give to a group of women who have never given up; to women who have kept on keeping on.

Today, I felt like a faker because I was able to supposedly give a gift to these women, Survivors all of domestic violence and sexual violence.

I thought I was brave.

I thought I had guts.

I thought I had seen suffering, survived it, eclipsed it. And in my ways, I have. But I was never PROUD enough to come out, as these women did, and said (without uttering a word) that they experienced it and are winning.

These are proud women.

These are strong and fierce women but they are fierce in a way that rejects aggression, fear, anger and self-pity; they don’t have time for pretense. They are on their way.

Every sixty minutes, from 10am to 3:30pm today, I was able to show (because I can’t say “give”) these women another gift they can give to themselves: the gift of gentle, loving, simple yoga and the gift of mindful meditation and self-awareness. What I was humbly offering, on behalf of The Duffy House Project (http://www.theduffyhouse.org) at its 5th annual “Day of Pampering” was facing stiff competition from other amazing services: complementary hair styling, mani/pedis, massages, housewares, shopping spree for mom and kids (clothes, shows, hand bags, suits), toy store, book store, child care and activities during these services, and prayer, but I was thrilled to be able to offer my services to even one person. Every ounce of everything today was donated by people like me and local businesses.

I prepped last night. I didn’t know what to expect. It was the first year I’d committed to The Duffy House (twitter @TheDuffyHouse). I was uncomfortable the first time they asked, I didn’t feel like I would be of value, I felt like I wouldn’t know how to talk to the women; like that their situations meant I wouldn’t be able to relate to them, that just because I wasn’t a survivor of the trauma they surmounted, that I wasn’t kin; that we were separate.

I know that might sound wrong, separatist, detached, even snobby, but the opposite could not be truer. I simply wasn’t being honest with myself. I am no luckier than they; I just had trouble admitting truths to myself. I’d spun my experiences to assuage my pain and hide my shame, shame that didn’t belong on me and shame that has no place on anyone but the man who’d taken advantage of me years before I cleared my head, made healthier choices and met my husband. But I am not here to talk about that; I’ve made peace with it all.

Nothing changed from then to now, other than my willingness to see my truth, walk in it and honor it and then when the time was right, as it was today, to give myself to these women and take the chance to move my own insecurities out of the equation. If I couldn’t muster the confidence and self-belief to give myself to these women, then I was not worthy of their time. I could not be a healer.

So I packed up eleven yoga mats, nine books, my Tibetan singing bowl, a stick from my yard that I found first step out the door this morning to strike the bowl, my iPod, my sound system, my truth and my courage.

the yoga mats are courtesy our school PTA. i use them to teach yoga to some 6th graders in the spring.

The room they gave at the church for the yoga was sublime: it was cozy, dark and away from the joyful noises upstairs. The lamp in the room needed a light bulb, so I borrowed one (and just remembered I forgot to put it back) from a lamp in a meeting room down the hall. It was IDEAL, it was like a dream mini-studio to me. The lamp with the borrowed bulb cast a loving warm glow in the tiny room. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.

Another yoga practitioner, Sheila (fake name), was lined up to join me in leading the women and we were going to alternate every 30 minutes. After the first round, Sheila and I had determined that 30 minutes was OK, but 40 minutes would be better. We were not as busy as I would have hoped, so if the women had more time between the other services they were offered, we took advantage of the cushion and spent more time with them. I would say the other provider and I practiced yoga with about 20 women and all the while, it was me and Sheila who got the gift.

My iPod played meditation music all day and I used only one book. I used the bowl three times and I unrolled five yoga mats that Sheila and I shared for the Survivors. I read a meditation on “assertiveness” to the women as they laid in the darkened room, their palms facing the sky to accept peace and give strength and when I stopped, I heard sniffles and I was honoring my own throat’s lump. Some women told me that reading was exactly what they needed to hear. So I made copies and handed them out after lunch and left them on the tables. They were all taken up when the day was ending.

As the afternoon wore on, the lobby of the church where these Survivors stepped in to receive their services was getting crowded. Gift bags and backpacks and balloons and trinkets were waiting for all the women and their children who’d honored us with their courage and trusted our hearts and hands and thoughts and energy.

I had the opportunity to speak with some Survivors; some were so transformed by changing their own lives, I’d mistaken them for service providers. Some were still quite broken and sad and I just sat near them in silence and honored the guts they’d shown me by not only persevering but by getting up and getting out and coming there. They could have stayed in; they could have stayed away, but all of them, just by being there, helped everyone else under that roof. The energy was authentic and spirited; the women were in their own way already in their peace. The other women in the neighborhood, many whom I’ve known for years, were on hand to help out, drive, be logistically available, run errands and keep the kids in check. This wasn’t an event for just the Survivors, this was an event for all of us and its effects are long-lasting, cementing, and so nurturing. I can’t wait for next year.

I’m not here to talk about Mother’s Day. Having a productive uterus does not a mother make. You can “mother” another human being, even a man can, just by being decent, nurturing, kind, patient, genuine and forgiving. As I said in another post about mothering long ago, “If your person [mother] wasn’t there for you to begin with, become the person You’ve Been Waiting For.”

Today, was no ordinary day and I am all the better for it.

Thank you.

UPDATE: Mind officially blown. Read what happened on Mother’s Day: https://mollyfielddotcom.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/check-writing-angels-growing-up/