The Vagina Momologues

When I got pregnant I entered what I consider vagina land.  All at once, I felt like everyone was looking, wondering and thinking about my vagina.  When I say everyone, I mean anyone who might have been thinking of me in the first place.

I had already assumed people were focused on my vagina because I had been blogging about sexual abuse (I even spoke about it at an event and posted the video on my youtube channel).  I agonized over sharing my history.  Even though I received a lot of support, I lost A LOT of friends.  Grown up me understands that not everyone is ready to talk and not everyone wanted to hear what I was staying.  The bigger parts of my brain and heart were just hurt and confused.  Yes I knew it was possible.  It still hurt.

I try to evaluate my feelings on the crazy scale based on what I figure normal people feel.  Does everyone feel like the world is staring at their vagina and picture the sex that had to have happened?  I don’t know.  That’s what I think about.  And it sure felt like my vagina was the focal point for the duration.

I had a couple of scares during the pregnancy.  Two of them involved a lot of blood and a lot of questions about poo and sex.  That’s what happens when you bleed during pregnancy.  You have to tell a lot of people about the last time you had sex and the last time you used the bathroom.  Because yes, pregnant women still do those things.

I had a third scare that involved my water breaking.  Turns out, you can have a very similar rush of fluid that is, in fact, not the sac of waters that surrounds the baby and is not pee.  I will have to remember that next time.

I had yet another scare that started off as some back pain.  My doctor thought it might be preterm labor so I rushed off to the hospital for yet another ultrasound, yet another pelvic exam only this time, they found something wrong.

I wanted to share all those things on my blog when they happened because I was terrified each and every time.  I wanted to reach out for reassurance.  And I couldn’t. 

I was hysterical when the first incident happened.  My doctor was so reassuring while I blubbered into the phone that the baby must be dead or dying and couldn’t possibly survive if he/she came so early.

I don’t know if a normal person would have reacted the same way.  I wish I could have asked some normal people.  I wish I could have asked some survivors if a) they had the exact same experience and b)how they reacted and ultimately c) how did it turn out?

I didn’t want to share my fears because I had already been blogging about things that couldn’t hurt me anymore and still felt exposed to the world.  I couldn’t bring myself to open up my actual, present, private life.

My son is fourteen months old now.  I haven’t been pregnant for quite some time.

Something else I struggle with is combining the different parts of myself.  Sometimes I go teach self-defense to other women.  I also write a blog about being a survivor.  I am also a mother although I don’t talk about my son in class and I don’t talk about rape around my son.  It’s not just on here that I haven’t quite figured out how to bring all my parts together.  I’m still many pieces that barely know the others exist.

The part of myself that is scariest to share is the one that is happy.  I have an entire manuscript that describes blow by blow how I grew up right up to the day that I got away from an abusive husband.  The three years that I wandered around single and independent, finding myself and discovering everything – now that would make a good book.  That’s something I’d want to read because it was fun and exciting and filled with stuff I never imagined I would do and that opened up into the life I have now.

This is coming from someone who has never been able to see next year’s birthday.  I didn’t think I’d make it to sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty…thirty-five this year.  Beyond the next few months or the latest crisis, I saw nothing when I tried to picture what life would be like.  I didn’t dream.  I saw the past and what had happened but never what could be.

The years in between have been a struggle.  I didn’t just walk away from the past and live happily ever after.  The healing that people talk about didn’t happen with the door slamming or any other pivotal moment.  Just hearing the word healing pissed me off. Reading about how to heal was a stockpile of bullshit.  Cleansing my life was not a pleasurable experience and it doesn’t stay clean anyway, it requires constant maintenance.

My mind races most of the time.  I berate myself.  I over-think and overanalyze.  I stress about everything.  I look at other people’s faces and think how nice it must be to be so simple and uncomplicated and have nothing to feel bad about.

I know these are thoughts of someone who is anxious, possibly a little depressed and probably a little too aware.  I’m just educated enough to know what to call my symptoms but not enough to diagnose and make myself better.   

One of these days all my little pieces will bump into each other and I’ll be very surprised at how well they all get along.

My good buddy Dr. Loafer told me raising a child can be a very therapeutic experience.  More than therapy and medication combined can provide.  I thought he was nuts.  Mostly because early on I was so sleep deprived and exhausted I thought I was losing my mind.  I didn’t want to share that either for fear someone might think I wasn’t ‘happy’ being a mom.

I have been thinking there might be a whole other dimension to parenting for those of us who are survivors.  From vagina land right to the PTA meetings.  There’s a space between the angry/childless/feminist/survivor Vagina Monologues (a collection of monologues about sexual violence, healing and getting to know one’s vagina) and the syrupy sweet, non-feminist, nothing bad ever happened except parenthood Momologues (a play that follows four women from birth of their children to kindergarten). 
So in an effort to bring my worlds together, I’ve started working on the Vagina Momologues. 

If one in three women is abused in her lifetime, it makes sense that at least some of them became parents.  Some of my struggles are relatively easy compared to a survivor who has to share custody of her kids with an abuser. 

These are not stories you find in the parenting books.  The people who make up a family – that’s in the kid’s section.  But there’s no book that explains why you only talk about some of the uncles in the family or why Mommy takes ten extra minutes to leave the house because she washes her hands so much and has to check the stove seventeen times to make sure it’s off.  Maybe I missed my copy of “OCD and Why We Are Always Late”

I also haven’t seen any books about the joy a child can be to the person who never felt worthwhile before.  It’s almost like we aren’t supposed to talk about it.  What if someone, you know, thought we were weird or something and worried that our kids weren’t safe with us because of our history.  I think that’s what it really comes down to.

Well fuck that.

I have a history and a vagina and a child.  And a blog.