The First Week of the Rest of Our Lives

Thoughts on women, gratefulness, Don McLean, and microplankton

We are a week in, and it’s hard to know what to say. Most of the people I know—including myself—have hidden from the news this week. By day four, I started scanning headlines but not going too deep. Yesterday, I listened to NPR for the first time on my way to campus, but within one minute was so consumed with panic I switched over to our local college radio station right in the middle of Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful. I leaned in, trying to feel that civic pride I used to feel when watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. O beautiful for spacious skies / For amber waves of grain / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!

Then I leaned in closer. O beautiful for pilgrim feet/ Whose stern impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat / Across the wilderness. Did we really make a thoroughfare for freedom, or did a bunch of men consume, devour, and suppress their way across a land that never belonged to them?

Yesterday, I sat through a lecture on materialism vs idealism, and by the end, I was feeling like a full-on Marx-level cog in a machine. Midway through, I literally had to pop a Xanax to keep listening. I do not want to stick my head in the sand. I do not want to avoid and pretend, but damn. I see a lot of blame being thrown at women just like me. White. Middle class. Cis gender. Existing in a liberal arts college community. Maybe we deserve it. But there is a good deal of us who do fight for essential causes, speak up, understand our roles in upholding the patriarchy, and actively work to change it. I’m no Mother Teresa, but I try and fail plenty.

In our neighborhood, a beloved mother and friend to many recently went missing, presumed murdered by her husband. Many of the people in my community fit into the same categories I mentioned above. Even still, just because you are living in a middle-class world, seemingly with all the benefits that come with that, as a woman, you can still end up with a controlling husband who beats on you, and one night, when he drinks too much, decides that your life isn’t worth anything. I understand this happens in other communities, states, and countries all day long every day, and when it happens someplace like this to a woman like her, it is going to get more media attention than the millions of women who are oppressed and abused and murdered in domestic violence the world over. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it happens to anyone.

All I am saying is you never know what other people are going through. I have supported myself since I was 19. I’ve worked for what I have, and I never got a dime from my parents, except for when I was 20 and had an abortion and asked my grandmother for $50 to pay for the post-abortion biopsy. Why did I have to have an abortion? Because I was a dumbass. Period. It was my fault. I don’t think a 20-year-old woman should have to spend the rest of her life regretting something she did when her frontal lobe wasn’t fully formed. It doesn’t make me a terrible person. And women should have the right to decide what path their lives will take. In this country, you can’t sell a kidney, but a woman can sell a baby. That should tell you all you need to know about how much people value women’s lives and reproductive health in this country.

No matter what socioeconomic group you are in, we’ve all been raised in a culture that makes some of us feel like we should stay silent even when men are using us as a punching bag. We’ve grown up in a culture that makes us get abortions in secret and not talk about it. We’ve allowed people to pay us less. Why? Seriously. WHY? As Desi Lydic said on The Daily Show last week: “WTF America! We have had two qualified, accomplished women nominated for president, and both times, they lost to the worst man in the whole country.” And according to polls, we largely did this to ourselves.

After Ray Charles finished up, the DJ put on Don McLean’s American Pie. All week, whenever I felt consumed with awful (thinking about trans youth being bullied and denied healthcare, hard-working families being split up and deported, the war in Gaza, environmental racism, the crucifixion of public education, poverty, abortion rights), I’ve tried to put myself in a fishbowl of gratefulness. Listened to that song was no different. I thought about my mom and how much I loved her. I thought about my sister staying up until 2 in the morning this weekend, making Christmas presents for the people she loves even though she can’t afford it. I thought about how proud I am of my son and his girlfriend for being good partners to each other. What a good partner and supporter of women my husband is. How I am grateful for his dad, who made it financially possible for me to return to school. I thought about how these things don’t come from being blessed; they come from being lucky. I thought about animals and books and color and handmade things and the gift of time. Then, I thought about the American fable and all that stands for in fantasy and real life. Oh, and as I watched him on the stage / My hands were clenched in fists of rage / No angel born in Hell / Could break that Satan spell. Then I shook that off and thought about me and my sisters and seeing Don McLean at the foot of the World Trade on the Fourth of July weekend in 1993. That’s the only time I remember all three of us being fully happy at the same time and dancing together as adults.

In oceanography class today, I watched the professor get excited about foraminifera, single-celled, shelled organisms living in the ocean. Their fossils can indicate all kinds of things about the state of the ocean from millions of years ago. It’s her field of study, and watching this 30-something-year-old woman get excited about something like that makes me feel good about the world. You might think getting psyched by microscopic sea life is unimportant or privileged with all that is going on in the world, but honestly, plankton are fundamental to life on Earth. As small as they are, it almost doesn’t get more important than that.

You could say that about women, too.

* she says from two feet under the sand. I just need a little more time…