Scatology and Eschatology

My funny kid.

ginamariewade — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:17:09 GMT

I posted this on FB but not everybody there is here, and it was just too funny.

My son brought in the detergent from the grocery trip last week.
He announced: "I am the Moon, I bring in the Tide."

Cats

ginamariewade — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:22:46 GMT

Occasionally we give the cats a treat of people food. They especially love chicken, which is the best of all the birds.

Hub noticed that they only eat cooked food - that on the occasion he has offered them a nibble of raw hamburger meat or a sliver of raw chicken, they are totally uninterested.

Which led him to the conclusion that when Cookie (the only outdoor cat) brings home a bird or a mouse or a squirrel and leaves it on the back porch, what he's really saying is "Throw this lil fella on the grill for me, whydon'tcha?"

Fandom snark.

ginamariewade — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:03:34 GMT

I know this is body snark and policing, but I can't help it.

There's a notice that the powers that be are auctioning off lunch with Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer as a charity benefit.

Nice and all, but my first thought - "They eat?!"

ginamariewade — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:33:29 GMT

My friend posted this on Facebook:
"If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand."

My rejoinder:
You forgot the part where the daddy makes $500,000 per year but spends all but $25,000 on his outside mistress, and cries when asked to pony up for the household expenses.

Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS

ginamariewade — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:41:28 GMT

Originally posted by deathpixie at Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS

For those wanting to know more about the recent DDoS attacks, yes, it looks like it was the Russian government trying to shut down the dissidents again.

As I said last time, while it's frustrating not to have access, LJ is a lot more than a social network platform. From the article:

"LiveJournal isn’t just a social network. It’s also a platform for organizing civic action. Dozens of network projects and groups mobilize people to solve specific problems — from defending the rights of political prisoners to saving endangered historic architecture in Moscow."

So while I know many are considering the move over to Dreamwidth and other such sites, supporting LJ is a way we can help support those who use it for more than a writing/roleplaying/social venue.

Also, as a FYI, LJ is giving paid users effected by the outage two weeks of paid time as compensation.

More Family Drama

ginamariewade — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:02:13 GMT

My brother broke a tooth yesterday.

It apparently was painful.

In an effort to relieve the pain, he pulled the remainder of the tooth out with his leatherman tool.

Because, you know, the fact that he hasn't got the money to see a dentist, even on an emergency basis, and there are no provisions for people like him to get emergency dental care without cash in hand - that doesn't mean we don't have the BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Because, you know, pulling your own tooth with pliers is totes what self respecting, capitalism loving Americans should do.

The humanity of Felton Norris.

ginamariewade — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:41:06 GMT

This is about show-Felton and show-Hotshot, not the one in the books. In my opinion, they are discrete entities.

Sure, Felton was violent, a v-addict, and shot his own daddy in cold blood. Sure, he clocked Jason upside the head and tied him up to be gang raped by all the women in the clan.

But in the few words we see him say to Becky on the morning (?) after her supposed encounter with Jason, we get a deeper glimpse into his character than meets the eye.

"Sex is gross and all, but it feels kinda good, don't it?"

Poignant. I think he was trying to comfort her.

"Sex is gross and all," he says. Likely his first sexual encounter was similar to Jason's experience, except he was actually related to the woman. Maybe it was his mother.
Incest is a powerful taboo in our culture, and even though the folks in Hotshot are somewhat isolated, they do interact with the wider community on some level. They have cars, they have electricity, they buy groceries, they make and sell meth. I'm sure they are all well aware of the general public's opinion of incest. They are certainly aware of how the wider community views them. Inbred hillbilly freak show, etc. So it's a fair bet that even though intrafamily and intergenerational sexual activity is a norm in Hotshot, younger Felton knew that this was not the case for the wider world. He probably felt like he was being bred like livestock, that he lost power over his own body, and it was in a way that was taboo and shameful in the wider culture.
"Sex is gross and all."

Addiction is common among people who have experienced trauma, and Felton is surely an addict. V gives the user super strength, endurance, and health (at least in the short run), and makes sex a deeper connection, too. Considering that they deal meth in Hotshot, Felton had probably used meth at some point in his life, and these are similar to the perceived effects of meth. At any rate, these effects would be very attractive to someone who feels powerless and weak, who has been forced into sex so much that "sex is gross."

He shot his daddy, who was apparently the headman in his community. Ostensibly it was to keep him away from the V, but there was probably an element of revenge in it as well.

Jason killed Felton in a kill or be killed situation. Felton was ultimately too damaged and violent to live. He completely lost whatever moral center he may have had.

But he was surely victimized by his culture, just as much as Crystal is. The victim becomes the perpetrator and the cycle continues.

Memorial Day

ginamariewade — Mon, 30 May 2011 02:21:19 GMT

When I think about Memorial Day, I think about Mr. and Mrs. Rainey. They were an elderly couple who went to my church when I was a kid. They were the last remaining charter members of the church which had been founded in 1920 or so.
They were always sweet and kind to me. He was a deacon, she was very involved with WMU. I never knew they'd had any children until I was a teenager.

My dad told me that they'd had one son. He died in Vietnam when he was in his early 20s. I don't know his name or any other details of his service.

My dad, who was never one to mince words about politics, said that LBJ had stolen their son from them.

I don't know what the Raineys' politics were. Because they were faithful members of a conservative Baptist church, they were probably true believers who thought Vietnam was justified in the fight against global godless Communist aggression. (As opposed to the point of view that the VietCong were nationalists fighting against French colonialism who approached the US after WWII to ask for help in their liberation, and we told them no, so they took help from Communist China instead.)

But even if that was what they believed, I can't imagine how painful it must have been to lose their only child to war.
How bitter it must have been for the Raineys to attend that church, which was always a youth oriented church with dozens of teenagers and young adults, especially in the early 70s, shortly after their son died.

They are dead now, and have been dead for more than a decade in the sweet reunion of the hereafter.

But on Memorial Day, those are the ones I remember- the people who are left.

Rape reported at Baldwin middle school - Local & State - Macon.com

ginamariewade — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:59:55 GMT

So a girl that goes to school with my son was raped at school one day last week. My son knows her.I asked him if he'd heard about the incident, and he said "Yeah, that's (X)." He didn't know the boys involved, but had heard that they were some of the boys who had failed 7th and 8th grade repeatedly and so were 14 or 15 years old.

He told me that the other kids were having the usual reaction when someone reports a rape around here, generally parroting what their parents say - "She wasn't really raped, she was fooling around with the boys and didn't want to get caught, if she was really raped, why didn't she scream," etc. I asked my son what he thought, and he said he didn't know. I asked him how he would feel if someone had attacked him and he told people, and their reaction was that it wasn't true or that he'd brought it on himself, and he was outraged. I told him that this girl was going to need friends and I expected him to treat her kindly and be a friend to her.

The girl was not at school this week until Thursday, so all the speculation was going on outside of her presence, according to my son. Yesterday when he came home, he reported that she'd come back to school and "Nobody said anything bad to her because she was all beat up." She had a black eye, apparently, and this was good enough to make at least some of the detractors concede that she might have been attacked.

I have no idea what the teachers have been saying about the incident, if anything. It may be that the administration/school board has instructed them not to talk about it for fear of law suit fodder, since it's likely that this could result in an enormous law suit.

It shakes me up a bit. It makes me worry a lot. My kid stays after school for clubs and things, and he has been a frequent bully target, so of course I worry for his safety as well.

In better news, he reported that the heirloom tomatoes that he helped to plant in the Eco Club garden are growing well. He has been staying after school 1-2 days a week to work in the garden, and loves it. This makes me happy. I personally do not enjoy gardening at all, but I am glad that he does.

Happy End of Passover, Y'all!

ginamariewade — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 03:40:24 GMT

Cognitive dissonance

ginamariewade — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:05:48 GMT

I was watching a program about the history of the KKK on the history channel at 3 in the morning one day last week. There was a segment that showed one of their pervertedly religious cross burning ceremonies, and at the end of it, this guy started playing Amazing Grace on the bagpipes.

Do they not even know who wrote that song and why? Do they have any clue how completely out of sync that song is with their evil, twisted, perverted ideology?

Your Silence Will Not Protect You.

ginamariewade — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:32:05 GMT

Working in the library at Temple this morning, I found a book about the Klan's campaign against Jews in Mississippi during the civil rights movement in the 60s.
Terror in the Night by Jack Nelson. I'm about halfway through reading it now.

What's interesting to me is that even though I thought I knew a lot about the civil rights movement, I'm constantly learning new things. Hub was trying to do a thesis for an MA in history on the role of Jews in the south in the civil rights movement before he had his first breakdown, and this book contains a lot of valuable information on that topic. Too bad he didn't know about it at the time.

I knew nothing about the bombings of various synagogues in the south in the 60s. I knew that scores of black churches had been burned, and I knew that the big Temple in Atlanta was bombed, but I did not know that other synagogues and other Jewish buildings in Meridian, MS, Jackson MS, Gadsden AL, Nashville TN, and Miami FL were bombed during this same time period. Even more interesting is that by and large, the Jewish populations of these cities were not interested in the civil rights movement. There was a large German-Jewish population that was very assimilationist, tried to de-emphasize the differences between Judaism and the fundamentalist Protestant Christianity that is the dominant paradigm here. In many cases individual members supported segregation and even if they privately had misgivings, they weren't about to say anything about it out loud and in public. The book does a good job of explaining the social and economic costs for whites for siding with their black neighbors. For example, one woman who ran a small local magazine in Mississippi said something in public in support of civil rights, and as a result, her magazine collapsed, her husband lost his job, her kids were harassed at school, her neighbors and friends shunned her, and a cross was burned on her lawn.
Of course, it doesn't compare with being shot down like a dog (for example, Medgar Evers, Lemuel Penn, and dozens of others) as blacks were, but I think that we take for granted today that we can stand up for the rights of others and it really isn't going to cost us very much.

So anyway, most of these congregations were not that interested in the civil rights movement, didn't see it as something that applied to them or was any of their concern, and tried to ignore it or at least keep quiet and keep their heads down about it and hoped it would go away and not affect them. But the nature of hatred is that it's catching. The Klan essentially punished the local Jews because so many of the freedom riders, activists, and organizers from up north were Jews. They came up with the same old tired conspiracy theories about the Elders of Zion and communist conspiracies and so forth, and used that to bomb and terrorize the local Jewish communities in addition to the black communities.

And the rabbi and other Jewish leaders in Mississippi went to the local ministerial associations and tried to get support from the larger white establishment and got lukewarm reception. Very few were willing to stand up and condemn the bombings. The Catholic hierarchy was - because they realized they were next in the Klan's line of fire. The Presbyterians and Methodists made token statements. The pastor of the largest Baptist church in Jackson refused to condemn the bombing from his pulpit until the rabbi's house was bombed, and then he made only oblique statements.
And it was totally out of fear.

All this stuff took place 1964-1968. I was born in 1967. This stuff was not that long ago.

We close our eyes and say it can't happen here, but it can and it did and it might again. This is why the stupid legislation against sharia law and trying to make it illegal to build mosques in certain locations is such a real threat to all minority religions and all decent people in this country, and we cannot say "not our business."

Funny Little Bear

ginamariewade — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:16:48 GMT

Little Bear has to write word problems for his math class.

Word problem 1 begins 'Cotton the Cat had two tunafish sandwiches and ate 1/2 of one, and gave Shadwick 1/6 of the other."
I argued that this was a false premise, because a cat would not stop at 1/2 of a tunafish sandwich and definitely would not share with another cat.

Second word problem begins "There are 200,000 zombies in Atlanta and only 4 known survivors..."

Oh, dear.

Capitalism A Love Story

ginamariewade — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:58:09 GMT

Hub and I watched Michael Moore's film "Capitalism: A Love Story" yesterday.

The movie is an analysis of the last 60 years or so of the American economy, from FDR through the financial meltdown of 2008.
I knew it would be depressing, and it was. There were some funny moments, though. Like his overdub of the Jesus movie from the 70s where Jesus' words concerning poverty and wealth were changed to be more in line with the current capitalist hegemony.
One thing that I wish he would stop doing: standing outside of a building with a bullhorn. That shtick is old.
It was not as powerful and not as good as Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, and Sicko, but it did make some good points and did engage in pretty good analysis.

He made a really interesting point about the derivatives market that crashed and threw us all into this big ~~Depression~~ recession - one that I essentially agree with. He went to several different Wall Street traders and asked them to explain what exactly was being traded in the derivatives market. Nobody could explain it coherently. This is consistent with what I've seen in other places in the media over the last couple of years. I'm a smart person. I can understand some really complex things. In fact, because I think differently from most people - I see patterns and motifs where others don't, in some cases, I see more complexities than most people do. (I'm not trying to be arrogant - it's just something I've noticed.) I don't understand what was going on with these derivative markets. It sounds like a big Ponzi scheme, and truthfully I'm not convinced that it wasn't. I feel like we've been had in a huge way. I don't think Bernie Madoff was the only one fleecing people on Wall Street.

That's not capitalism. That's trickery, smoke and mirrors, piracy, and theft.
That's not building a better widget and making money based on your superior widget making skills, that's conning people out of money based on your ability to be a colder blooded reptile. And I do not understand why otherwise decent, intelligent, moral people will bend over backwards to defend it.

The last part of the movie, Moore showed the newsreel footage of FDR's final state of the union speech, the one where he outlines his ideas for a "second bill of rights," a bill of economic rights. Here's the wikipedia article, it looks like what was presented in the newsreel footage.
I don't remember being taught about this in history class in school, but wow, it makes me understand why the right wing hates him so bad.
But I think that the rights should be implemented. Moore made the point that Americans never got these rights, or got them only piecemeal, whereas Europe and Japan absolutely did.

Moore also contrasted his family life, the idyllic existence he had in Michigan in the 50s when his dad was an autoworker, and all the things that they had and the comfortable life they had, with the reality of today and how that life doesn't exist any more for working class people.

It underscored the reality that the middle class in the US is shrinking, that we are becoming a "plutonomy," that 1% of the population controls more wealth than the other 99% put together, and it didn't used to be this way.

He showcased a couple of interesting examples of class war - that the sheriff of Wayne Co. Michigan (Detroit) has declared a moratorium on foreclosure evictions, because so many of the evictions are based on tricky adjustable rate subprime mortgages, and a family in Miami that is squatting in their foreclosed home with the support of their neighbors.

Movie review - Chris Rock's "Good Hair."

ginamariewade — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:22:29 GMT

The other night night we watched Chris Rock’s documentary “Good Hair.”
It was really good. It was complex. It raised a lot of issues.

Chris Rock has said that he made the movie because of and for his daughters, because even though they are very young – preschool aged – one or the other of them was concerned about whether she had good hair. There are some brief shots of him with his daughters, who are adorable, and he is completely shmoopy with them, which strikes a chord with me. I am hoping and praying that his relationship with his daughters will mitigate some of the misogyny he has shown in his previous work. I like Chris Rock and I think he is generally funny, but he has had a misogynist streak that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. (e.g. all the wife beating jokes from about 10 years ago.)

The movie gave a sweeping overview of hair care products for black people, from relaxer to weaves, the fact that it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, the fact that very few of the companies that make and distribute the products are black owned but most salons are, and just some of the craziness associated with black peoples’ hair, especially black womens’ hair. Like not getting caught in the rain, not touching it, and spending enormous amounts of money on it. Like the armies of Indian women who sacrifice their hair in an act of Hindu piety, and whose hair is later used to make $500 or $1000 weaves. A lot of the nuts and bolts of Hair Rules I already knew, because Lisa Jones gave me Cross Cultural Hair Education 101 when I was in 11th grade. I didn’t know how much weaves cost, though. It was weird for a man to cart around a rolling suitcase full of packaged hair, and note that it was worth $50,000.

Some of it was shocking. Like relaxer. I’ve known roughly what it was and what it was for since junior high. What I didn’t know? The primary ingredient of Classic Relaxer is Sodium hydroxide, AKA Lye. The same stuff that’s in oven cleaner. A chemist demonstrated what happens if you put it on a piece of chicken, what happens if you soak an aluminum soda can in it. Answer: it’s so caustic that it burns a deep hole in the chicken after an hour or so, and completely dissolves the soda can in about 4 hours. And people put this on their hair. Terrifying.
There is another perm solution chemical – ammonium thioglycolate. This is the chemical in perms that white people get, too. It straightens curly hair but curls straight hair. You can’t mix the Classic relaxer with this stuff, and the ammonium solution is not as toxic and not as harsh. However, it is still a harmful alkaline chemical that can burn the skin. Disposing of it is tricky - if it gets into water, it kills fish.

How crazy is it that we as a culture have decided that African hair is so ugly that it must be eradicated, altered, and transformed by smearing oven cleaner on the heads of women? There’s our white supremacist heritage rearing its ugly head again.

There’s an interesting scene towards the end of the movie where Chris Rock is talking with a group of female college students, one of whom has a natural hairstyle. And one young woman whose hair was processed in some way tells the young woman with the natural hair, “You look cute and all, but I wouldn’t hire you for a job because your hair looks out of control.” Or something to that effect. And you can see the poor girl’s psyche just deflate.

This was a pivotal scene for me because it underscores how much other women are enforcers of social control. This movie was about the hair issue, but similar scenes have played out all over the world, with one woman telling another that something about her is substandard and just doesn’t fit, thereby increasing her own status and making sure that the cultural norms are maintained. Here it was hair, in other contexts it’s weight, or clothing styles, or sexuality, or education, or athletic participation… the list goes on. Pretty much anything that a woman might want to do that breaks the socially prescribed mold – she might get negative feedback on it from the men in her life but the women in her life will do it more often, more directly, and under the guise of friendship, Even if it’s pressuring the woman to do something that is physically harmful, and not just something that kills her spirit. And that’s a hard thing to stand up to. A lot of women don’t learn to stand up to that until they are middle aged or until some irreparable harm has been done.

Overall, this movie made me profoundly sad, but it had a lot of funny bits. I do highly recommend it.

"The Blind Side"

ginamariewade — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:23:00 GMT

Went to see the inlaws today, and they took us to see "The Blind Side," because it's one of those inspirational, based-on-a-true-story movies that my MIL loves. Nothing wrong with that.
I enjoyed the movie, for the most part. But it did have some problems, in my opinion.
For those that don't know, it's the story of NFL player Michael Oher, an African American teenager who was taken in and adopted by a white family who assisted him to catch up academically and get a football scholarship. He did really well as a player for Ole Miss and was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens this past spring.
Positives: 1- It is based on a true story, and the true story is heartwarming.
2- There were funny moments. The writing was snappy. Sandra Bullock was great as the kind of rich woman who expects everybody to jump when she says hop.
3- There are, in fact, throwaway kids who are in and out of the foster care system, who are completely failed by the educational system, who don't have anybody to care for them, and who deserve a lot more good in life than they get, and it's nice to see a story about something good happening to one of those kids.

However.
Negatives: 1- The movie's portrayal of Michael at the beginning was... problematic. Patronizing. Extremely patronizing. He hardly spoke. He went about his business without complaining. This white family took him in to their mansion, bought clothes for him, and taught him to play football (this part isn't even biographically true - the kid had played ball for a public school during his freshman year, according to Wikipedia.). They treated him like a stray dog. During one sequence of the Football lessons, he is literally on a leash while pulling the younger child of the family. I realize this is an actual piece of training equipment, but the image is there and unfortunate. The family even reads children's books to him - Where the Wild Things Are and Ferdinand the Bull. I can't imagine even the gentlest, most kind spirited teenage boy sitting still and listening to bedtime stories for little kids. He could not possibly have been that much of a a babe in the woods. The movie portrayal made it seem like he had barely seen civilization before, yet it simultaneously notes that he had grown up in a very rough section of projects. He is portrayed as being tabula rasa - the only personal preference he expresses has to do with rugby shirts.

2- Did we really need another movie about how black families can't raise their kids without the intervention and largesse of well meaning white folks? Did we really need another movie showing the black community as irretrievably broken, full of thugs and drugs and men who threaten to rape white women? The young man must have met some positive people in the 16 years before he arrived at the private school with its athletic ambitions, but you wouldn't know it from the movie. The father of Michael's friend, the man who introduced him to the private school and in whose house he was staying prior to moving in with the white family, has about a minute of screen time. In contrast, the thug with the machine gun necklace who really doesn't have anything to do with advancing the plot is onscreen for at least three times as long.

I could probably think of more things that bothered me about this movie, but I don't really want to. My heart wants to take it as offered. There should be more rich people who have almost everything opening their homes to poor foster kids and hire tutors to help them get an education. There shouldn't have to be the pre-requisite of athletic talent in order for needy kids to get a fair shake.

Thanksgiving

ginamariewade — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:22:27 GMT

Ok, we all know that the ritualized Story of the First Thanksgiving is bunk.
The Pilgrim story was created as cultural mythology to explain the beginning of our nation. The Pilgrims didn’t come to this country for religious freedom, they came because they thought they could make some money. If they were interested in religious freedom at all, it was the freedom to make an even stricter and more religiously pure society for themselves. The Natives who taught them which foods were good to eat probably did so out of basic human kindness, because they had caught the English settlers robbing graves and storehouses, but they themselves had been decimated by plagues and the survivors were traumatized, so there were other motivations, too.

Despite that, Thanksgiving is still a holiday that resonates for me, that celebrates some things that I think are worth celebrating and thinking about.

The biggest one is Religious Freedom. The First Amendment came into being because when the colonies were set up, religious belief , church membership and attendance was prescribed into the local laws. That’s why people were exiled from Massachusetts and executed for being Quakers. When Thomas Jefferson was born in Virginia, it was required to be a member of the Church of England, and illegal to be a Baptist. To change this, to codify into our legal documents that government has no jurisdiction over the contents of our heads or the convictions of our hearts – this was a stark departure from the way that things had been in the colonial period and for most of Western European history. Religious Freedom is a precious thing. I am profoundly thankful for it.

This is why I get so aggravated over things like prayer in public schools and religious symbols on public property. It is necessary that we do not impose our religious convictions on one another in an official capacity in order to preserve the religiously neutral component of our system of government. This is not infringing on your rights to believe as you see fit, to pray and worship in the way most meaningful to you, to adorn your house and your yard with large and expensive Flying Spaghetti Monster decorations. If you get bent out of shape because “they’ve” taken prayer out of school, nativity scenes out of the public square, and the Ten Commandment plaques out of the courthouse, do the mental exercise of pretending that the religious display you like is replaced by a symbol of a religion that you do not like. Would it still be OK? Replace the prayer at the football game with the prayer/praying style of a religion that you don’t like. Would it still be OK? If it wouldn’t be, then there is your answer as to why the one you like is not OK.
(Honestly, I have problems with seasonally decorating public buildings at all, for any season. Why do we even do this? )

All My Babies - on Netflix

ginamariewade — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:52:25 GMT

On a whim I picked out a documentary called "All My Babies" from Netflix. I picked it out because it was described as a documentary about African American midwives in rural Georgia in 1952. To be more accurate, it was made as a teaching film for those midwives. It was filmed in Albany, in Dougherty Co., in 1951-52, which was an interesting time for a white filmmaker to be working with a black cast.
My grandmother was a midwife at roughly the same time, two counties over, and although she was white and her clients were white, the poverty was the same, so it was sort of a window into her world, and that was my primary reason for picking it out.

I have never been so profoundly moved by an educational film. The director covered all the pedagogical points that he was supposed to cover, but he also captured some of the grace and care of this one midwife, Mrs. Mary Coley, known as Miss Mary in the film. The birth of a baby is shown in detail, and the care of preparation is highlighted. The materials are humble - newspapers, kitchen pans, towels, etc. The birth was really beautiful, and afterwards, this lovely young woman is smiling at her newborn. In the director's commentary, he noted that when the young woman saw the film, she expressed that she was embarrassed because her skin was so dark. Doesn't that break your heart?

The film won awards at the time, and was picked up by UNESCO and sent around the world as a teaching tool for instructing midwives on sanitary birthing practices.

Letter to the Editor

ginamariewade — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:19:42 GMT

I wrote this. Maybe it will be published in the Macon paper.

About a week ago, an 11 year old boy in Decatur named Jaheem Herrera hanged himself because he was bullied by his classmates. When he told the adults at his school, the bullies upped the ante by calling him a snitch in addition to the other epithets they had pounded him with for the last year.

Time and time again, kids who are bullied by their peers have turned their rage inward with suicide or outward with school shootings, and time and time again, we as adults in the community pontificate about every tangentially related issue under the sun (guns, religion, video games) except the one that is most cogent to the situation.

It matters how we treat other people. It matters from the time we are in nursery school until we are in the nursing home. It matters so much that it is a basic tenet of every organized religion on this earth - the Golden Rule. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Don´t taunt and belittle one another, even people who are different. Even the people who are stupid and annoying deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Even people who disagree with us deserve to live in peace.

How many parents teach this to their children? How many parents will sit down with their children tonight and ask them if they really think other kids deserve to die for being unpopular? I hope that other parents will sit down with their kid, as I have, and tell them that nothing a bully could ever do or say is worth hurting himself over.

We never know the effect our words and actions will have on another´s heart. I hope that Jaheem´s short, sad life will serve to start conversations like this and prevent other tragedies.

What if we castrated all the men?

ginamariewade — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:25:00 GMT

I was just thinking this morning about the politics of hysterectomies, and how they are so common as to be nearly routine for women over a certain age. I can't think of many women in my family over the age of 45 who still have all their parts. My mom had a hysterectomy when she was in her 30s, both mothers-in-law, eldest sister in law, and I'm pretty sure all of my aunts have had them... Of these, I know for sure that one MIL did, in fact, have cervical cancer and got her uterus removed for that reason. The others, I think, had theirs removed because of irregular, bothersome bleeding when they were going through the change, and they had their ovaries removed "just in case."

But those are important parts. Ovaries produce sex hormones.

What would the world be like if the medical establishment said to men "Oh, well, your male hormones are obviously out of whack and causing you problems. You should have your testicles removed so that you will feel better and calm down." What would the world be like if almost every man over a certain age was castrated?

Can you even imagine the uproar that would greet such a pronouncement?

Mikveh

ginamariewade — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 15:14:46 GMT

Going to the Mikveh

The day I went to the mikveh for conversion, it was cold. I remember that most of all. I think it was New Year’s Eve, or close to it. I had completed my course of study and filed the UAHC paperwork back in August. The Reform movement does not require the mikveh for conversion, only saying the Shema in front of witnesses and pledging to cast my lot with the Jewish people. But during the course of my study, it had become very important to me and I wanted to do it, so I made arrangements with the other rabbi I knew.
The rabbi told me to meet him at the mikveh behind the Orthodox shul in town, and the Mikveh Lady would let me in. I had to undress and shower off, and take off everything – my glasses, my earrings, my rings, and the hair band around my hair. The Mikveh Lady inspected me to make sure I was clean everywhere – under the nails, between the toes, behind the ears. She did it quickly and perfunctorily, like a nurse would. The mikveh was small and nearly vertical, with a catwalk that led to a staircase down into a small pool, about 6x6. I was instructed to go into the pool and turn my back to the door, and the Mikveh Lady would stand at the door watch me submerge. A few feet behind her, the rabbi and the other witnesses were in earshot but not able to see me, and they heard me say the blessings.

I had a towel wrapped around myself during the walk, and I hung it on a towel rod before getting into the water. The towel rod was four or five stairs above water level. The stairs spiraled down, so while I had my back to the mikveh lady when I started to descend, by the end of it I was facing her. I walked down the last few stairs completely nude, watching my belly bounce and sway before me. Like most fat women, I don’t particularly enjoy being naked in front of people I don’t know well, and the inspection and those last few steps were as much an act of faith as the whole conversion was. I stepped into the water and it was warm. It smelled like rain. A mikveh has to be from a natural water source, like rainwater, a river, a spring. I think the mikveh I went to had a rainwater filtration system on the roof. As I stepped in and began to float, I understood that I was standing in a symbolic womb. I’m sure that I would have understood the symbolism before if I had been thinking, but at the time, I was too caught up in the post-Baptist thing. I went to it with the intention of cleansing away the previous Baptist baptism.
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When I was 13, I saw some kind of scare ‘em into converting movie about the evangelical idea of the apocalypse, and I was so terrified that I went to the front of the church sobbing and asked to be baptized.
A couple of weeks later, on a Sunday night, I put on a pair of fishing waders over my clothes, and a white robe over that, and stepped into the baptismal pool with Brother Jimmy, the racist, misogynist pastor of my youth. He baptized me in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and I rose from the water with wet hair and a nose full of chlorinated water, but not much else. I started falling away from the church less than two years after I was baptized, and by three years, I had burned my baptismal certificate. I was so angry and disgusted by the dogma and politics of that church that I was incapable of seeing any good in it. By the time I came to converting to Judaism, I felt contaminated and defiled by it. I saw the mikveh as a way of healing and cleansing myself from the spiteful grotesqueries I saw.

I curled into a ball and immersed myself in the water, feeling its warmth touch every part of me. In the primal quiet and solitude of the water, I felt the knot of my anxious self come undone. I so enjoyed this feeling that I didn’t surface quickly enough, and I was jolted from my reverie by the mikveh lady shouting down “Are you OK? Are you OK? You Can swim, can’t you?!”

I said the blessings and went beneath the waters three times, as required. “Speak up so the rabbi can hear you,” the mikveh lady said in a stage whisper. When I was done, the mikveh lady closed the door and I emerged from the pool. I wrapped myself in my towel, dried off and dressed and went home.

I dimly remember from infancy the feeling of having a warm bath and a good snuggle, and how it made me drowsy and content. After leaving the mikveh, I fell asleep in the car on the way home.

At the time, I felt peaceful and content, pleased that I had formally acknowledged my Jewish neshama (soul). I didn’t think about the deeper issues of self-acceptance at that point.

I have been on the journey towards self-acceptance for the better part of my life. My mother likes to say that I’ve scrapped for everything I’ve gotten, and she’s right. If I believed and gave credence to what the average person on the street would say about my body, I would never get up in the morning. I would mutilate and starve myself any way that I could. I would hate myself for existing. People have actually said to me “If I looked like you, I would kill myself.”

I don’t know what exactly it is about fat women that Americans love to hate, but I have been the butt of jokes and reviled as ugly since I was five years old. My first fat girl memory is of crying on the playground because the kids I played with started calling me “Fat Albert” and were taunting me “Fatty fatty, two by four, can’t get through the bathroom door, so she peepeed on the floor.” I didn’t know then that crying about it would make the bullies zero in, that showing hurt and betrayal would be interpreted as a sign of weakness. I didn’t have the thick skin I would learn to develop.

It took a long time for that skin to grow, and I was miserable and depressed throughout grammar school and high school, and most of college. As the years passed, and I grew fatter and fatter, I dieted to try and make myself more acceptable. I tried every diet offered to me. I suffered through hunger pangs so strong I could barely think. I suffered through blinding headaches. I lost some weight, but when my will power faltered and I gave in to the normal human urge to eat until sated, I gained it back with interest.

I internalized the lessons that fat girls have to be more modest than other people, that my arms and thighs are so revolting they must be covered at all times. For me, and for women like me, wearing a bathing suit in public is a political act.

The power of the mikveh is that you go in naked. Just you, the way God made you, with every feature and every flaw, into this symbolic womb. The womb of the Shekinah. (The Shekinah, the Presence, the Feminine nature of the Almighty.) The blessings are simple. “Blessed is the Creator who made us and commanded us to purify ourselves through immersion.” But in the act of blessing, you are acknowledging that you are created in the divine image. No matter what kind of issues about how ugly, unattractive and shameful. It is a blessing of the body, not the soul, and that is the purpose of the inspection – to prevent any barriers or artifice.

I am created in God’s image. All of me – even the curves and folds and ripples of fat. I am exactly what the Creator intended me to be.

Kind of an elegy

ginamariewade — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 00:18:27 GMT

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” - Sylvia Plath

My dad died in 1999, just a few months before the end of the Millenium, an event that he had talked about with me for years. As a child he calculated for me that I would be 33 and he would be 65 at the end of the 20th century, and I remember that sounding impossibly old.

My dad was complex. He grew up in East Macon, in the mill town connected to the cotton mill where his parents worked, met, and died. His hardscrabble efforts put him through Mercer University during a time when working class kids rarely made it through high school. He started off with a white collar and a tie, but he was unable to sustain that for long enough to make the American Dream. Whether it was true or not, my mother’s version has him blaming her for his misfortunes. Maybe he was just unlucky. Maybe it was his own fault. Maybe it was a little of both. He had a sharp temper and a foul mouth, and he would tell his boss what he was not going to do, and what the boss could do with that job, and so on and so on. He had his own business – a sandwich shop in Warner Robins – but it could not survive the recession of the early 80s, and that defeated him more than everything else did. He was never the same after that.

But this is about how he died.

About two years before he died, he was working as the janitor at Belk’s department store. His job was to take away the stocking boxes and plastic wrap from each department each day, empty all the trash from the registers, and clean the bathrooms. For this, he was paid the princely sum of $7 an hour, and he had some kind of health insurance with a really high deductible. That fall, he got really sick and was in the hospital for 2 weeks. Final pronouncement – congestive heart failure, which was not surprising since he’d had high blood pressure for 25 years and had rarely taken his prescribed medication for it. Partly out of stubbornness, partly because even in the good years he couldn’t afford it. He also had some suspected heart blockages. When he left the hospital at the beginning of November, he returned to work through the end of the Christmas season and was laid off at the end of December.

Somehow I doubt that there were suddenly fewer toilets to clean.

He never had health insurance coverage again, because he was 63 years old and did not yet qualify for Medicare. And when you don’t have health insurance, it’s very difficult to get medical care. Doctors don’t like to work for free, and we all know that in America, being sick is a privilege and you shouldn’t do it if you can’t afford it.

He was prescribed Coumadin to make his blood thin enough to pass through the blockages in his arteries. He knew from his pest control days that Coumadin was the same chemical as Warfarin, the rat poison, and he would joke that he could get the same thing for cheaper from White and Lavender instead of Kroger Pharmacy. The doctor at the sliding-scale clinic tried to make it sound like that was just as good as a heart cath, an angioplasty, and a bypass, which are the procedures my mom had about a year before he got sick. But he got none of these. The Coumadin made him bruise easily, and his hands constantly looked like he had been fighting. In his younger days, that would have been true, but he was old and defeated now and the bruises on his hands were merely sad.

I didn’t realize how sick he was. Just after my son was born, I asked him to take my trash to the recycling bins behind my apartment. My strong dad, who had always been able to do the hard labor in the family, shuffled out the back door and down the hill with such effort you would’ve thought he was moving a piano instead of a cardboard box of aluminum cans. A few minutes later, we heard him calling for my mother. Somehow he had managed to get his finger stuck in one of the cans while tossing it into the bin, and was bleeding like a stuck hog, to use my mother’s delicate phrase. Mom ran out the to the parking lot to take care of him. I didn’t run anywhere – I still had the Montgomery bandage across my middle from my c-section and I couldn’t go anywhere or move very fast, which is why I had asked my dad to take out the garbage in the first place. He came back in, huffing and coughing, with blood dripping down his arm. I got paper towels and my first aid box, and we held gauze squares over the wound and pressed down on it. It was just a little nick, like a paper cut, and about as deep, but the rat poison in his veins caused his blood to flow like water for ten minutes.

He knew he was dying but thought he would be able to forestall it by embarking on a bizarre regimen of every health fad he heard about. He drank gallons of water, green tea, and cranberry juice, because he heard these things were good for cleansing the system. He started taking garlic capsules and chitosan, because he heard that would break up arterial blockages. If somebody had told him that the Roto-rooter man could help him, he might’ve tried that, too. It was pitiful to see.

The next summer he and my mom came to my son’s first birthday party late, after riding in their un-air-conditioned car, and his hair was windblown and he smelled bad and his clothes were dirty and he didn’t have his teeth in. My mother’s hair was also messed up and she was wearing a mock-turtle neck out of shame from her scar. My friends were there – my rich, successful, blow-dried and put together Atlanta friends, beside whom I always feel second rate and less than, and I was ashamed that my parents looked like homeless people. I could see my friend’s husband suck in his breath and wince when my mother fawned over their daughters. I could see the cocked eyebrows and unspoken judgements when my dad was telling bad jokes. I turned away and looked at the wall, embarrassed at how ugly they were, embarrassed at how low down poor and trashy they were. I am mortified by my superficiality now.

About a month after that, he died.

I was so excited about going to my first academic conference for my social work internship. My folks came to see me off, and we had breakfast at Shoney’s on Sunday morning. He was in a good mood and we actually got along OK that day. I was happy and went to my conference in Savannah and was gone until Wednesday afternoon. When my husband picked me up, he started putting the suitcases in the car and said “I have some bad news for you.”

When I was a kid, this sentence was always followed by “Your father has lost his job again,” so when Marc said it, I naturally assumed that this is what he was going to tell me. That he had lost his job. But that’s not what he told me. He told me that when he went to get our son from my in-laws in Augusta, my mother had called to tell them that my father was dead. We had to go to Macon.

My mother had an ophthalmologist appointment that morning, and my dad went with her to keep her company because he was not working at Chic Fil A that day. He sat in the waiting room while she was in with the doctor, and there he fell asleep and died.

His body was taken first to the emergency room, where they flogged his corpse for half an hour before pronouncing him dead, and then to Snow’s Memorial Chapel. The family came. My aunt Nell graciously allowed us to gather and receive visitors in her home, since my parent’s home was not really fit for human habitation, much less presentable for visitors. My mother and my uncle made the arrangements. Of course, my dad had not pre-purchased a grave for himself, because that was morbid and he didn’t want to think about death. Luckily, there was a space in the family plot, and he was buried at the feet of his parents, under a pine tree, on a little hill overlooking the Ocmulgee River. It’s very nice, actually.

For the visitation on the night before the funeral, we all gathered in the parlor at Snows – my mother, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my husband. My aunts – my dad’s two younger sisters – had sotto voce predicted to my mother that going to visitation would be pointless, since nobody liked my dad anyway and there wouldn’t be anyone there. What a horrible thing to say to a grieving widow. What a vile, poisonous thing to say to anybody who has lost a loved one. They were so wrong. There were people there from the time we arrived until the staff at Snows locked the doors, and still for weeks my mother got cards from people who said that they had been turned away. My husband later commented that he didn’t realize how many men just like my dad there were in the world.

The day of his funeral, a day trader in Atlanta went berserk and killed a bunch of people he worked with. It was surreal – I was sitting around at my aunt’s house in uncomfortable clothes, trying to keep my toddler from breaking my aunt’s knick-knacks, while my cousins and I watched the breaking news coverage of this lunatic blasting through offices a hundred miles away.

But then it was time for the funeral, so we went to the chapel at the funeral home, and then to the graveside, and then to a covered dish for the family at my mother’s church.

The pastor of my mother’s church, a man named Stuart McCrary, gave the eulogy at the service. Stuart is an Irish Baptist. As in, From Ireland, with Lucky Charms accent and everything. Every Southern Baptist funeral I had ever attended in my life was a generic sermon on the uncertainty of this world and the eternity of heaven, with lots of brow beating and the veiled threat that if one was not a properly saved Baptist, there was no hope of seeing your loved one in the hereafter. No comfort and no crying – because what is there to cry about if someone’s in heaven? So Baptist funerals tend to be stolid, cold affairs, in somber colors but without any outward displays of emotion. But Stuart’s service was not like that. He elicited stories from my uncle and aunts, and from my mother, and from me, and wove them into a beautiful portrait of a man I couldn’t see for all the baggage between us. Maybe he did this because he was Irish. Maybe this was just his personal style. All I know is that I have never appreciated any pastor’s work as much as I appreciated that service.

My dad and I had a lot of unfinished business. He was mean to me for no reason when I was a teenager. He said awful things to me when I was grown. I didn’t speak to him for nearly two years before my son was born, because he had been so nasty to me about so many things for so many years. He had a rotten temper. He used to beat the crap out of me and my brother. He had a large hand in making my brother into the anti-social misfit he is today.

But he gave me a love of history. He took me to historical sites around town and didn’t just read the plaques, but told me about his personal experience with the places. He told me about finding arrowheads by the river when he was a kid, and arrowheads in his back yard. He grew up about a mile from Ocmulgee National Monument and Ft. Hawkins, so the arrowheads were the real deal.
He could be remarkably tender and loving. When my son was born, he laminated the picture I gave him so that it wouldn’t get creased in his wallet, and showed it off proudly to all of his customers at Chic Fil A. He also had one of my baby pictures in his wallet. Like he liked me better before I learned how to talk back.

When I was little, he was always working. Seven days a week, sometimes, night shift for months on end, he worked and worked to try and get ahead, and he never did. When I was young enough to want to be a daddy’s girl, he was at work, and when I was too old for that but needed a dad for other things, he was too depressed and bitter and violent. When my son was born, my dad told my husband that he never regretted anything so much as he regretted not being around when my brother and I were small. That being at work never got him the things he wished he had, and he felt he had squandered the time he could have had with us. Later, he told my mother that he was really proud that my husband was such a good dad and he wished he could’ve been like that.

When I go to Walmart and see a rounder of short sleeved plaid cotton shirts, it makes my heart ache. Stooped old men with dark hair make me catch my breath. The scent of Old Spice. The sound of a man humming. For all the times he hurt me, I still miss him. I don’t want to say the corny things, like how I would trade this and that for more time with him, or that such and such doesn’t matter now that he’s gone. It does matter.

It does matter that he told me I was too ugly for anyone to marry. That he told me on my wedding day that he was surprised my husband was actually going to go through with it. That he told me my problem was that my smart mouth didn’t get backhanded enough when I was little. That he beat me with a bed slat when I was in 6th grade, so bad that I couldn’t sit down and had bruises for a week. That he and my mother laughed in a restaurant about beating my brother with an extension cord to get him to go to school, but he dropped out anyway. That he told my mother she was white trash from a crusted shit on a mule’s asshole backwater town. That he would try to pick a fight with me in the waiting room of the ICU when my mom had surgery.

It matters, because I don’t want to be like him, and I don’t want to hate him, and I didn’t want him to die before we could come to an understanding . How could someone who could be so gentle sometimes be so twisted and hateful to the people he was supposed to love?

He’s been dead for 4 years this coming Monday, and it still feels as raw as sunburn.

My autobiography

ginamariewade — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:25:04 GMT

The first part of my autobiography:
Some of this has been edited more than other parts.

I had always imagined myself to be a love child – the dramatic culmination of a forbidden love that was as passionate as it was illicit – and though my dewy-eyed, love sotted parents had been forced to send me out into the world at birth, we would one day be reunited and I would learn how they had yearned for one another and for me. And it was so romantic to think so.
The truth, as it always does, turned out to be more ordinary, prosaic, without a scrap of romance to be found. I am a garden-variety bastard, the result of too much beer and a college educated one night stand. She was a college sophomore, he was a clerk at a liquor store. She was a little tipsy and he was a little handsome, and she was a little overweight and hadn’t had her share of kisses yet. The night, the drink, the music, and some half-assed lines talked her into his apartment and out of her clothes.
And I was conceived.
It was the beginning of 1967, and she was a student at a prestigious but straight-laced Methodist university where nice girls didn’t have babies without husbands, but she was a fat girl and she could wear a girdle and continue taking her prescription (so they must be OK) diet pills, and hide her big belly until summer. Then her parents rented an apartment for her in a city far away, so that nobody they knew could see the shameful daughter parading her pregnant self up the rickety stairs to the cockroach infested apartment. Of course, the baby would be adopted. There was never an inkling of an iota of a shadow of doubt about that. She met another man while she was pregnant, and while he was wonderful in his own little way, he was not going to raise another man’s child, and being a dad was just not where his head was at, man. And her parents were certainly not going to explain to their friends at the country club that they were raising a bastard grandchild.

In September, she went into labor and her parents came to see her in the hospital. Everyone knew that the baby would never be hers. If she didn’t see the little baby girl and her parents didn’t see her either, they could all forget it ever happened and everyone would be better off. So little bastard me squalled and fretted in the back room of the nursery. The nuns in the Catholic hospital knew that I would be adopted, and they took pity on my immortal soul and had me christened Gina Marie.

In December, my mother married the other man and moved to California, where she saw the Rolling Stones at Altamont and worked as a student nurse in an orthopedic hospital for returning vets. Later, she moved back east and divorced the man who would not be my father. She married another man and had two children to replace the one she’d lost, and I became a ghost baby for her – not quite real, but not quite forgettable, either.
I should be grateful, I suppose, that I was born in the time and place of mid-20th century America, where my mother was expected to give me up and go on about her middle class life without me. We weren’t in the Middle East or Asia where she would be stoned or strangled by her brothers in an honor killing. We weren’t living a century ago when she would have been expected to keep me and she and I would be social pariahs, forced into prostitution and living on the edge of town. And many conservatives point out with a grin and a sneer, I should be grateful that I wasn’t aborted, because it wasn’t legal then. More on that later.
Two weeks after I was born, I was adopted by a pack of wild Baptists. That’s what I tell people, anyway. It’s only half-true, because they weren’t very wild. They were conservative, religious, traditional working class Southern people, with all that implies.

My folks passed the strict tests offered by the state for adoptive parents. They had a stable house and a stable marriage, and mom had lots of miscarriages prior to applying for adoption, so they knew she was a deserving woman who had done everything right and couldn’t have the baby she was entitled to. That sounds a lot more bitter than they actually deserve. My folks weren’t bad people, it was the process and the morals of the time that were so screwed up.

The story repeated to me in childhood went like this:

Mama and Daddy wanted a baby very badly, but mom’s baby maker wouldn’t work right. They were very sad. So they applied to adopt a baby, and one day, their caseworker called and said that they had a baby for mom and dad to pick up. They went to the agency office, and all the caseworkers said “You are adopting the most beautiful baby we have ever seen.” The caseworker brought me in, and everyone beamed. I was so beautiful. Peaches and cream complexion, big blue eyes fringed with dark lashes, dark blonde curls on my head, a little rosebud mouth. They put me in the car and drove to see my mom’s parents, my grandparents. It was dark by the time they reached Cuthbert, and it had been raining all day. As soon as they hit the city limits, there was a tremendous crash of thunder and the whole town lost power for several hours. My folks arrived at my grandparents’ house in total darkness, so everyone crowded around with candles and flashlights trying to see my face. “You were so pretty you put the lights out,” they proclaimed.
My folks loved me to distraction, and when they adopted my brother two years later, they loved him to distraction, too. Love didn’t pay the bills, though, and it didn’t prevent my dad’s temper outbursts. And it certainly didn’t improve the neighborhood we lived in.

Nowadays, when people talk about adoption, there is the assumption that only upper middle class and wealthier people adopt children. Only sterling parents adopt. Why would poor people be approved to adopt in the first place? How could poor people afford to adopt? Well, my folks were marginally middle class when they adopted us, and there was a surplus of unwanted, mother-free babies in the late sixties, bracketed neatly between the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade. My folks had a house, my dad had a steady job for long enough to pass the home studies, they had health insurance, both of my folks had some college education. Back then, they probably looked OK. But a combination of personality traits and bad luck sent them on a spiral downwards into poverty, misery, and squalor, and I don’t know that any of us have fully recovered.

We were poor. My dad lost job after job. He opened a business, which failed miserably. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics back in the 50s when a college degree really meant something, but somehow he was unable to translate that effort and intelligence into a steady job and a decent standard of living. Maybe he was just unlucky. His temper was his downfall, and in the thirty-seven years of my parents’ marriage, he held 33 jobs, each one less prestigious than the last. In his final days, he worked at Chick Fil A as a cashier for less than $6 an hour.
The appliances which had been shiny and new when my parents married became old and broken down, and there was no money for repairs or replacements. The house started falling apart, starting with the bathroom, then the roof, then the very walls. The cumulative effect of this severely depressed him, which made his temper worse and didn’t improve his job prospects any. He stayed at home without a job and stewed in the festering failure of his life, and my mother worked two jobs to keep us fed and clothed. When I was in junior high, we ate nothing but grits and canned salmon for weeks at a time. We got food boxes and Toys for Tots at Christmas for several years. We went without hot water and heat for years, because the gas lines under the house got chewed up by our dog. We went without running water inside the house at all for quite some time, and flushed the toilet with water from a bucket brought in from the spigot outside. In the summer, I washed my hair on the back porch with water from the hose. In the winter, we boiled water on the stove and mixed lukewarm bathwater in the tub. We went to the laundromat when we could afford it, which wasn’t as often as the clothes got dirty. In the winter time, it was cold and I hated to bathe and wash my hair in the cold, so I got the reputation of being dirty and stinky, which made me even more popular at school than I had previously been, when I was only too fat and too smart and socially inept.
I was a fat kid and a smart kid, and my parents were fundamentalist Baptists with very rigid ideas about alcohol and divorce. (Other things, too, but those two were the issues that earned me the most points with my peers.) I was one of two girls on my street, and she was into Leif Garrett and the Osmonds while I was still cradling baby dolls, so we weren’t exactly friends. For reasons that mystify me to this day, the boys in the neighborhood hated me very much. They hated me, they hated my family, and I don’t know if this hatred was rooted in anything other than the reasons I previously gave, but they tormented me every day of my life until I left for college. They called me names and threw rocks at me whenever I was outside. They tortured and killed my pets. They followed me home from school every day telling me the gory details, and I was too fat to walk or run fast enough to escape them.
When I was 9, one of them raped me. I did not know how to speak of it until I was twenty one. More on that later.
Then there was church. We went every time the door was opened from the time they brought me home from the adoption agency. I can still remember the smell of the church nursery, the taste of the over-sweet koolaid they served for snacks. I went to the kindergarten run by the church. My pastor’s son was my playmate when I was very small. One day when he and I were playing in his backyard, we found a dying baby bird that had fallen from its nest. We prayed fervently over it while Tim laid hands on it to heal it in true faith-evangelist style, and it may have been the beginning of the end when nothing happened.
This was the church I went to, upon whose everlasting arms I leaned, singing in the choir and getting fattened up at dinner on the grounds. Now that I am a grownup, I can see that there were sincere, good hearted people there who went out of their way to cushion my childhood from my family’s shortcomings. Who did I think arranged the Toys for Tots and food boxes? Who eventually fixed our hot water heater, our furnace, our plumbing during those long years of economic deprivation? This was all laid out for me after my father died. But at the time, all I could see was the hypocrisy and stifling conformity.
Bear in mind that this was the deep, deep south shortly after the civil rights movement. Public schools were not desegregated in Georgia until 1970, and there were still diehards making threats against black teachers and black students in my mostly white elementary school when I started first grade in 1973. Bear in mind that this was a Southern Baptist Church, and even nowadays the Southern Baptists are hardly standard bearers for progressive thought. Despite the stated doctrine that each believer is supposed to interpret Gospel for himself or herself, Baptists are very dogmatic, and dogma translates into prejudice, no matter how many semantic loops are made. I was taught that the King James Bible was literal truth. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Dinosaurs were a creation of the devil made to fool people into disbelieving the Bible. Women should not be preachers, women should not be deacons, and women should not hold any positions of authority over men in the church, unless we’re talking about women working in the nursery and teaching Sunday School to children below the age of accountability. This was justified by something Paul wrote – “women, be silent in the church.” Divorce was unacceptable, remarriage doubly so. As a child, I was forbidden to play with children whose parents were divorced.
The first lie I remember consciously telling my mother was this – in fourth grade, I told my mother that Dana Wallace’s father was dead, instead of revealing that her parents were divorced. Alcohol was evil, everyone knew that. When I was eight, we picketed city hall opposing beer and wine sales in the city Coliseum. My mother was such a fanatic teetotaler that she did not keep vanilla flavoring in the house.

But ultimately, the dogma that drove me from the church was racism. I was taught that blacks are inferior and should be separate from whites. This was cultural, I learned it at my mother’s knee. I learned it from all the adults around me . It was reinforced by my Sunday school teachers. The only biblical citation for this that anyone ever offered me was the verse in Leviticus about not yoking an ox and an ass together. I never heard the Ham, son of Noah interpretation about the drawers of water and hewers of wood until I was much older. But despite the insistence on literality, Baptists are good at drawing their own conclusions. Blacks and whites are as different as oxen and asses, therefore there should be no interracial marriages or “mixing” in other contexts, either. This led to some bizarre rules and circumstances. My grandmother had a black woman babysit for me and my brother for a time while my mother was in the hospital having a hysterectomy. We were supposed to obey her and treat her with respect. But we were not allowed to talk to black children on the playground. We were not allowed to have black friends at school. We were not allowed to watch television shows that featured black characters. My whole family said “nigger” as casually as they said cat and dog. Yet, saying the “n” word in public warranted getting one’s mouth washed out with soap, especially when my brother told the black babysitter that she lived in niggertown.

When I was about 14, the church choir went on a summer trip to Dayton, Ohio – hardly an urban, hip, with-it place, but it was different enough. We sang in a church up there and went to amusement parks and museums for a few days. I was startled to see black people who attended the church where we sang. Black people and white people, sitting on the same pews, worshipping in the same church, drinking their grape juice and eating their saltines right next to each other. I had never seen this before – not ever. By this point in my life I had consciously chosen to defy my family and I was trying to be as un-racist as I possibly could. I’m sure I overcompensated in embarrassing ways. But I was trying. The adults in the tour group were not so enlightened. Despite their nicey-nice attitudes while in the church and at the social events given by our hosts, the entire trip back home – about a fourteen hour drive – they were reading jokes from the Truly Tasteless series of books to each other. The most vile, obscene jokes about big lips, velcro hair, big penises, and the rest of the canonical list were volleyed back and forth between the youth minister, the music minister, and half a dozen other respectable adults all the way home.

Later that summer, the youth group went to an apartment complex just a few blocks from my house, and we were instructed by our pastor to knock on doors and invite the residents to a special event at church. We were instructed to act like we had the wrong address when black residents answered the door.
I could not reconcile this with what I felt in my heart, what I had learned by reading my Bible, and what I learned in public school – that all people are created equal and should have equal rights, that God loves us all the same. I could not reconcile it. I knew that what I was being taught was perverted and contrary to Truth. Molly Ivins said that “… all Southern liberals come from the same point – race. Once you figure out they’re lying to you about race, you start to question everything.” And I did. Shortly thereafter, I quit the church completely. I burned my baptismal certificate. I desecrated my childhood Bibles. I erased the tapes that my mother had made of me singing solos in choir and taped Dead Kennedys songs over them. I tore up attendance certificates and other awards that I had received through Sunday School. I wrote the lyrics to anti-religious punk songs on the walls of the bathroom at church. I cursed the church and made sacrilegious jokes at every opportunity. If Marilyn Manson had been around then, I am sure I would have bought his records with fervor. I can relate to his upbringing, as we are of an age.

All of this caused terrible screaming fights between me and my parents. On Sunday mornings, I would feign headaches and nausea, which culminated in fights. Usually, my mom would give up when I started banging my head against the bedroom door. Some of this was general adolescent orneriness and rebellion, but I had genuine differences of opinion and moral problems with the church I was raised in, and these genuine issues were never addressed. They still are lying around like proverbial elephant in the living room, ossifying.