Dream

I haven’t been at my best this week. My new schedule and new commute shaves an hour off my free time. I wouldn’t have thought one hour would make such a difference, but it’s been a really difficult transition. I feel like all my free time is spent feeding, clothing, and cleaning myself in preparation for my new upcoming cycle of non-free-time, which makes me wonder aloud what in the world I’m alive for.

I’ve been really being shitty at myself about this, slipping into absolutist thinking. Suddenly, not getting my lunch prepared in advance or messing up dinner isn’t just a shame, but this apocalyptic horror that will deprive me of all that I enjoy in life. Of course, when I do have free time, I tend to spend it watching movies in a disdainful , exhausted stupor and hating myself for not being more productive.

The other day, I was waiting for my bus when I saw a woman walking with her two children to the bus stop across the street. She was obviously in between errands, carrying big boxes of stuff, and tromping through the terrible sucking snow. Her youngest, a little boy, kept begging to carry something, and she was rooting through her box to find something light enough. Her oldest, a 4 or 5 year old girl, kept running ahead and shaking her butt at cars, announcing that she was dancing. The mom found something to hand the little boy, and he held it above his head like a trophy, stomping his little feet in the snow. I couldn’t help but smile at them, and wonder at the mysteries of being a parent, of watching these little things shout out their own individual personalities in every direction, and knowing that you somehow created those personalities. I could see, for a flash of a second, why parents talk about it all going by so fast; those kids were so cute, it didn’t seem like there could possibly be enough time in all the world to absorb everything they have to give. Someday that little girl will be in professional clothes walking down the street with professional adult face, and you will never see her wagging her butt at cars again. That will be a secret about her personality and true self that only you and she know. No wonder parents want to absorb every one of those moments for safe-keeping.

I usually spend my time at the bus stop sighing continuously, thinking about all the chores I have to do at home, and grieving the fact that it will be an hour till bedtime before I am able to sit down and do something that isn’t an errand. I was suddenly struck by the comparison of that mother and me. That mother was in between errands, like I was, and she probably wouldn’t get to sit down until well after bedtime. Free time? Yeah, right. And yet, she was having a pretty neat moment in life. It hit me like a thunderbolt: “No wonder I’m depressed if I keep telling myself that 90% of my life doesn’t count.” When I get fed up with having to eat, shower, work out, travel from one location to another, clean, dress, do laundry, I’m getting fed up because these are all the things I have to do before I can “live.” So maybe, I thought, I should change my definitions and my expectations. Maybe I should consider every moment that I am alive to be a moment where I am living. It sounds really simple, like, “The snozzberries taste like snozzberries,” but it hit me with a force that helped jar me out of my self-pity cycle.

Still, it didn’t jar me completely. By the time I got to bed that night, I was already in another tailspin of self-doubt and exhaustion and dissatisfaction. I was having trouble getting to sleep, continually replaying every chore I had to do tomorrow, and every wrong ever done me, and every wrong I’ve ever done. Finally, I tried a 12-step trick. I started thanking God. To clarify, I’m agnostic, but I sometimes use the term “God” as a convenient shorthand for “forces of the external universe and/or my internal hidden psyche that sometimes do not seem to be altogether chaotic or unaware, and from which I can learn things if I am listening.” The 12-step trick is to thank God for things you have and ought to be thankful for, but also to thank God for things you don’t have but are trying to get. For example, if you feel so angry at somebody you could slap them, you say, “Thank you, God, for giving me patience.” If you are walking around feeling like your life is worthless and no good, you say, “Thank you, God, for each moment I am alive.” If you really can’t dredge anything up, you thank God for every single thing you are doing. “Thank you, God, for this moment where I am brushing my hair.”

At a basic level, it replaces negative self-talk with a simple calming gratitude. I usually find something that I hadn’t realized before. For example, I had this one day where every little thing had gone wrong. At the end of the day, I locked my keys in my running car on one of the busiest streets in my city. My cell phone and wallet were also in my car. I was ready to scream and throw myself into traffic, so I immediately reverted from “one day at a time” to “one second at a time” to try and get me through. This one second I am not slitting my wrists. This one second, I am turning to walk towards these businesses. I do not know if they can help me, but in this one second, I will walk towards them instead of collapsing on the sidewalk and crying. I also started my internal retinue of thanks. Thank you, God, that today is warm and rainless. Thank you, God, that these businesses are far away and I have time to calm myself. Thank you, God, for my ability to thank. Thank you, God, for my ability to walk.

The fellows at the closest local business were very friendly, for which I gave thanks. They let me use their phone and phone book. I had a place that I’d called for locksmithing in the past, but the friendly guys insisted that I call the place they knew. That locksmith was the best, they said, and always very prompt and cheap and just really great, here, we’ll call for you, you just go watch your car. I felt like arguing, but I was already flustered, and they were very friendly, and I did want to go back and watch my car. So I let them call their guy, and while I was waiting, I paced up and down the street thinking up all sorts of new things to thank God for. The fact that I had eaten only an hour ago, so I wasn’t hungry. The fact that I had taken the extra time to use the restroom before getting in my car, so I didn’t have to piss like a racehorse. The fact that I had the money to afford a locksmith. The fact that I had repaired my car just recently so running idly for half an hour wouldn’t kill her.

When the locksmith arrived, he was a complete asshole. He was cheap, he did a fine job, but he was such a fucking jerk about it the whole time. I felt like throwing myself into traffic again – I just could not take more shit, I could not. So I took a deep breath and thanked God for my patience and calmness. Once the dude left and I was driving home, I was still on the verge of tears and madness, so I kept thinking of things to be thankful for. One thing I discovered is that the well never runs dry on thankfulness, much like it never runs dry on Everything Is Wrong when you’re in one of those moods. And while getting creative with my gratitude, I realized this had been a good lesson for me. When I was flustered and upset and the guys were so friendly but kind of pushy, I had really felt like I wanted to call my guy instead of theirs. I was hesitant and wary of their guy, for no real reason – I just wanted something I knew. But they were being so nice, and letting me use their phone, and my day had already been so hard, and there’s no reason to stick with the place I know, really, and I don’t want to offend them because I can’t handle it if they get mean, and yadda yadda… So I thanked God for showing me, yet again, that I am right to trust my intuition. No matter what else is piled on top of it, no matter how much a situation conspires to make one answer seem the simpler one, that doesn’t make it the answer I want or will accept. I thanked God for the illustration of how in all matters, big and small, with good people and bad people, I can and should trust my own gut.

So, sometimes the thankfulness thing can be a really good mental and zen-like exercise. I started it up the other night, and kept it on until I fell asleep.

While asleep, I dreamed I was a small child who had died somehow. I was innocent and good, so I went to Heaven. Heaven wasn’t at all what I expected. In fact, it was exactly like the real world. The only difference was, God had taken care of everybody’s most basic needs, the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Nobody needed food, and nobody needed shelter. Everybody could have these things, if they wanted, but there was no need. There was no hunger or thirst, or pain or death from exposure to the elements. Beyond that, God left things up to us. There were rumors in Heaven that there were multiple Heavens, and in the upper levels, more pieces of the pyramid were taken care of. Above the level I was in, for example, nobody felt fear or pain anymore, so it was said. You had to earn your way up into those Heavens, and you had all the opportunity to do so by showing God how you could act when most of your baser motivations were removed, and when you lost the fear of lost time.

God didn’t hang around the Heavens or Earth very much. Though she was technically omnipresent and omniscient, she was also very busy, and didn’t have the time to muddle about in a lot of bullshit. If you managed something spectacular, it blipped on her radar. Being God, she found all sorts of things spectacular, from great feats of human ingenuity to a little kid suddenly discovering empathy, so there was no concern that you’d somehow “get your wings” and God wouldn’t notice. She just wouldn’t be around the whole time to hold your hand, or listen to you warbling.

The part of Heaven I entered first was like a big baseball field at nighttime. A bunch of little boys were playing a baseball game. They saw me and came over to say hi. Since I was a girl, they decided they had to try and impress me somehow. Since God wasn’t around all the time, she had left everybody with a sort of emergency defense system. If you said certain words in a certain way, a reserved “Wrath of God” spell would hit the spot you indicated, and God would arrive soon after. This was definitely for emergencies only, but the boys decided to show off by incurring the Wrath of God.

The Wrath of God was pretty exciting. The sky split with lightning, and something like a cross between a glowing chainsaw and a terrible, terrible finger hit the earth, splitting it into pieces. The baseball field was no more.

The boys and I bolted, knowing we were in deep shit. The boys had been the ones to do it, but I had encouraged and egged them on with a lot of, “You can’t call down God, you’re not cool enough,” and I knew somehow that would put me in as hot of water as they were in. We knew God was generally a nice God, but God was also an adult, and adults got punish-y when you touched things you ought not touch. Our fear was that God would send us to Hell, which was exactly like earth, but none of your needs are met, and all external forces attempt to hurt and depress you. It’s hard to keep yourself good in Hell, good enough to get back up to Earth or Heaven again, and of course it’s terribly sad the whole time.

When God finally arrived, she looked like a middle-aged social worker in a bad tweed suit. She found us hiding in the bushes – I mean, honestly, she was God, did we really expect some bushes would throw her? She was very angry, and very disappointed, but had us all explain to her what had happened and why we had done it. After all of that, she asked us how we now felt about it. Of course, we were all very sorry, because only now did we realize that we really could have hurt somebody, and we had ruined a field that people liked to play in. God softened after that and told us she had figured out how to fix it. From now on, we would be the child-watchers. When new children came into Heaven, it was our job to explain to them how things worked, so this sort of stunt wouldn’t happen again. If we did a really good job at that, we could consider ourselves forgiven, and we would probably really enjoy the new job, to boot.

When I woke up, I only considered it a generally nice dream. But as the day went on and I kept going back to it, I decided that maybe it had some sort of message encoded in it, some kind of “thank you” in response, if I would just listen properly. I eventually settled on this: God wants me to know that she’ll take care of food and shelter; I can leave that to her. My job is just to keep helping the kids. Also, God wants me to stop calling her down for all sorts of ridiculous shit, because she hasn’t got the time. I’m not the kind of person who prays that God gives me gold, or strike down my enemies. But when I get in a funk, I think pretty apocalyptic and wrathful thoughts about myself, who I should be, what I should do. I try to bring down the Wrath of God upon myself, because sometimes I hate myself that much. But that also implies that I think I’m that important and unique in all the world, that I can draw down that kind of punishment when and where I want it. Though it’s all entwined with self-hate, that’s still a very sick and self-centered arrogance, a way of showing off how very different my life is from everybody else’s.

So, I’ve tried to let go of a lot of things, which I think is what other people mean when they talk about “faith.” Whenever I see a house for sale and start thinking about how I’ll never ever get the money together to buy a house, my god, that’s so astronomically adult, I now stop myself and say, “God told me not to worry about that. God said she’d take care of it. Okay, God, you can have my anxiety.” Every time the grocery bill is bigger than I expected, and I start into a spiral about how I’ll never get ahead and have a 401k and college funds for future nonexistent children, I stop myself and say, “God told me not to worry about that. Okay, God, I give my most important possession — my fear and need for control — over to you. You can have the anxiety, though it’s really hard for me to give; I’m going to trust you and do like you told me.”

And in reality, I don’t have to worry about these things. I wish groceries didn’t cost so much, but I can still afford them easily, with only minimal dips into my luxury funds. I wish I lived in a better place, but I have lived in far, far worse places, and at times I am still very happy here. I want more than I have, but there are wants that are aspirations, goals, and dreams, and there are wants that are hateful condemnations of the life you currently live, and I overindulge in the latter. I want a house someday. I want enough money to buy and try new things, and support children, and buy the fancy retro red couch set in the vintage store window. I want a career I enjoy that will help me acquire these things. Those are goals, hopes, dreams, things that will be so awesome if and when they happen. But what I have instead is a job I like very much, an apartment that is sufficient, and a life that is still full of untapped possibility with all my “old” things, much less bringing in new ones. I obscure all that when I start thinking about how there is something wrong with me, or the world, that I don’t have more than what I’ve got.

So now I remind myself – very often, it seems, because I allowed myself a bad habit – that God told me not to worry about the basics. She’s got it covered. All I’ve got to worry about is helping the kids. I feel like my life has been cleaned out by this realization, all my guilt and obligations swept aside. I’ve been given permission to focus on the thing I really love doing very much, and it makes me want to laugh out loud that I was waiting for permission. So, thank you, God, for the ability to give, and thank you, God, for the ability to dream.

Not a Real Post

Definitely a real plug.

Sady, for whom we have the Sady-love, has made the blog post that will henceforth be printed in the dictionary under “Context.”

It is a post about the use of offensive words, and it sounds like thoughts that happen in my own brain, but come out like, “Words are… bad? Sometimes. But sometimes not? I’M THINKING” when I try to explain. So, all thanks to Sady, for organizing my brain so I can use it again.

Another Post About Parental Notification

I’m slowly being given more responsibility in this area. It’s difficult to get me trained, because there is no manual, standards, or procedures. Part of this is due to the intentional vagueness of the law, but mostly it’s because everybody is terrified of writing anything down. As I mentioned before, the department that processes these bypasses (from now on, I’m going to call it Department X) has volunteered to do it. There’s no particular reason why Department X should be doing it, nothing in the department description that qualifies them for it. It’s simply because they volunteered, and nobody else wanted it. The handful of people who are involved in processing parental notifications knows Department X does this – that includes judges, their law clerks who do scheduling, a few court clerks who have been around a while, and the person who works in archives – but otherwise, it’s a closely guarded secret. The fear is, if it gets out that this public governmental department processes paperwork for citizens according to the dictates of the law, they will lose funding. I just want to emphasize every time I say this: this public department, funded by taxpayer dollars, is afraid of suffering reprisal for following the law and providing a public, legal, and technically mandated (if somebody requests it, the government has to provide it – ostensibly) service to taxpaying citizens.

The fear beyond reprisal is that judicial bypasses will be kicked back to the administrative court clerks, whose job this should technically be. They used to do it, apparently. But through a mixture of incompetence, apathy, and prejudice, they almost always managed to screw it up profoundly. Processing legal paperwork is never easy, even in the best of times, so dealing with a law that is intentionally vague makes the possibility of errors stratospheric; vague laws are almost political guarantees that a court clerk will destroy your paperwork and makes your rights bureaucratically inaccessible. Then you have the general prejudice of government employees, who have to deal directly and frequently with the public. They get irritable, lazy, sloppy, angry, and often more racist, sexist, and classist than they were to begin with. Then, throw in any significant anti-choice sentiment. Put all that together, and what you get is court clerks that mangle a girl’s paperwork (forcing her to come back another day, and need I remind you that abortion is a very time-sensitive issue), treat her poorly because she’s young and maybe black and probably slutty, and then maybe strut her around the lobby making it clear to all witnesses that she is there for an ABORTION and ought to be SHAMED.

Because Department X does not enjoy the shaming of young women or the withholding of their legal rights, they volunteered to get this process away from the fuck-up fingers of the court clerks. And this is why Department X is so afraid of having this taken away — they know what the girls will have to go through if they have to go through clerks. As it is, the department still gets drop-in anti-choice harassers. Tour guides, or court clerks giving a tour, used to drop by the front door and loudly announce, “This is the department that GIVES GIRLS ABORTIONS.” If there were some young-looking women visible in the office, BONUS PRIZE: “See, there are GIRLS IN HERE RIGHT NOW.” Luckily, Department X has recently been relocated to a very obscure area of the building, and it’s incredibly difficult to even find it. Bad for the girls who need to get here, but great once they are here – they don’t have to worry about a court clerk (who they may or may not see when they actually go in front of the judge) pointing them out, loudly announcing their likely business, and shaming them for being whores.

So, all this adds up to my training going slowly and carefully. Mostly it’s coming through fumbling experiences and mini-bouts of advice. Now, for reference, here’s the process for a girl: girl goes to clinic, gets counseling, makes an appointment. Girl brings counseling certification to the department. Department X types up paperwork. Girl gets interviewed by somebody in the department; this is her second interview – once she’s finished, she’ll have been interviewed by the clinic, the department, and the judge, which is a lot, when you consider that they’re explaining the most intimate details of their lives to three strangers with ultimate power over them. The interview and the paperwork go up in front of a judge, who (depending on the judge) asks or interrogates the girl about her decision. The judge will usually grant the bypass (exceptions for cases of coercion or fucked-up paperwork, which a judge will never grant), then the girl gathers up her paperwork, goes back to the clinic, and gets her procedure.

Department X usually pulls in volunteers for the interview part. Secondary interviewers – if a volunteer isn’t available – are Department X employees. The use of volunteers is twofold: it reduces the money spent on this process (which keeps the department off the radar), and ensures that the person doing the interview is likely pro-choice and, for whatever reason, committed to this work. That makes things go much better with the girls. When the employees of Department X do the interviews, they do a good job, but they don’t like it. It’s sad work, and hard work, and not in their job description. So it’s not as great for the girls, to have to reveal their innermost private life to somebody who is really kind of annoyed.

I haven’t sat in on an interview yet, but I get little tips and hand-offs from the volunteers and employees. The first thing I was warned about was that I would hate some of these girls. That really shocked me. I mean, I may not like all of them, I may have my quietly and privately-held opinions about their choices, but seriously, who hates these girls? I mean, who is pro-choice and hates these girls? The advice got amended: I was told that some of these girls are so stone cold stupid and obnoxious that I will just want to punch them in their stupid obnoxious face. But, the interviewers told me, all you have to do is think, good LORD if this stone cold stupid obnoxious girl doesn’t want to have a baby, I will SO help her with that. You want an abortion? Here, have TEN, just STOP QUOTING BORAT.

I wanted to give the interviewers the benefit of the doubt, since they’ve been doing this longer than I have, but I couldn’t help but wonder if little prejudices were sneaking in. As in the rest of the court system, there’s a disproportionate representation of certain classes and races. These girls are mostly black, mostly poor, and obviously young, while the employees and volunteers are mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly middle-aged (also mostly female). It’s probably very easy for an intersection of racialized sexism or sexualized racism to slip in, along with classism and ageism, assigning value judgments, blame, and characteristics where they don’t really exist.

Then I handled the paperwork for a day.

And oh my god those little brats. Because the thing I forgot is, yeah, these girls need help, and yeah, these girls are caught in a nasty political intersection of harassment, laws, exploitation, lack of resources, sexism, racism, ageism, classism – but they’re also teenagers. And teenagers are fucking obnoxious. Teenagers show up late. Teenagers get lost. Teenagers wander off when you’re talking to them because they want to get some candy. Teenagers drag their feet and call you a loser when you tell them you’re an hour late because of them and could you just hurry. Teenagers won’t hang up their phone when you’re trying to get them to sign a Very! Important! document. Teenagers interrupt the judge and roll their eyes. Teenagers make out noisily with their boyfriend IN COURT. Teenagers sing repetitive annoying songs to amuse themselves. Teenagers knock over tables and then laugh and say the table was gay. Teenagers remain blissfully unaware and apathetic of the fact that they are a stand-in for your political beliefs and most deeply held passions, and then they make fart noises with their hands. Teenagers sneer and loiter and laugh irritatingly and mess up the office and knock things over until you want to grab their scrawny little necks and… and… and… find a way to get them access to the medical care and autonomy they need. By the end of the day, I was feeling just like that: “Oh, you little fucker, if you don’t shut the fuck up RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I am just going to do everything I can to help you, I swear to god.”

Sometimes teenagers are awesome. We had a girl the other day who was just completely on top of her shit. Most of the girls who come in, they won’t even say the word “abortion.” I never assume that means they don’t want one; I assume that they feel shy, ashamed, or frightened, or they expect that I want them to act shy, ashamed, or frightened, or I’ll call them a baby-killing whore. Also, I mean, these are pretty young kids, most of them, suddenly thrust into a grown-up bureaucracy. They don’t know how to act, so they get vague and quiet. But we had one girl the other day who said “abortion” clearly and without shame, and I immediately liked her. She was very business-like and organized, knew what she wanted, knew how to get it. She arrived promptly, behaved appropriately, and was even fun and interesting to be around.

She was also white and apparently middle-class — had a cell phone, designer clothes, fake tan, was obviously involved in sports or some other kind of fitness (the space and equipment to get fit isn’t free, especially in the winter), and drove a car, meaning she both has access to a car and access to somebody who taught her how to drive, two things that aren’t easy to acquire when you’re underprivileged. From some things she said, she had obviously researched the laws and knew her rights, likely meaning she had access to a computer and the internet, the knowledge to use them, and some degree of privacy. She was comfortable dealing with professional adults asking her very personal questions, comfortable to the degree where I heard raucous laughter coming from the interview room as they yukked it up. That girl had a lot of privilege, and it came through for her when she needed it.

I compared her with another girl who had come in earlier. This girl was younger and African-American. She took the bus. She had nobody with her. She was quiet and withdrawn. I had to speak to her several times to get her to respond. Usually I call the girls up to my desk and have them sign their paperwork, but after calling her name several times and getting a blank stare, I had to bring the paperwork to her and physically put it in her hands. It didn’t appear to be an intelligence issue – her handwriting was clear and her grammar was legible – but a psychological issue. That girl was in her own head, and she was not coming out. I’ve seen other girls like her, to varying degrees. Unable to speak clearly or loudly, hands crossed over their chests, feet pulled up on the chair, unwilling or unable to make eye contact.

I know I’m not meeting these girls on the best day of their lives. They’re having a rough time. I know that some of them are glad they’re going to get an abortion, and feel relief. The girls who come in with some support person — a friend, a sibling, their mother — are more able to express this. Others make friends with the girls in the waiting room, and they’re also able to talk more honestly about why they’re there and how they feel about it. Department X isn’t technically allowed to let the girls speak to one another — confidentiality, and all — but there’s practically no way to stop it, and I see no reason to force them into a shame bubble of silence.

But the girls who come in with nobody, who cannot be reached by words, who cannot make eye contact… some of these girls, I know, have been raped in such a way that they know and can identify that it was rape. Many were raped, but do not call it that.

When speaking with the privileged girl, I was struck by how confident, outgoing, and funny she was. I thought to myself, I can see why somebody wanted to be with you. I can see why somebody wanted to have sex with you. And then I think about the girls who are curled up in the corner, who look or are twelve, who do not respond, who do not make eye contact, who are quiet and frightened, and I think, who in the world wanted to have sex with you? I’m not trying to say that these girls don’t have wonderful qualities, that they are ugly or unlovable. What I am saying is, who is looking at a twelve-year-old who is frightened of her own shadow and saying, that’s who I want to stick my dick in?

Statistically, I know who is thinking this, and it’s older men. Predators. The younger the girl is, the more likely that it’s a family member thinking this. And, legally and morally, it’s rapists. Only a rapist looks at a girl who is still a child, a girl who has no support, no confidence, and primarily sees her as a way to acquire sex.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

I had a social worker friend who once described a conversation she’d had with a female client who was trying to get back on her feet. She had met a new guy that she was very excited about. Oh, sure, there were problems, but who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, he was so committed to her, so committed to working out everything. The woman brushed off the few times he’d encouraged her to have sex with his friends as times that they were all just sooooooo drunk, but it totally strengthened their relationship because they’re not even the jealous types. And, of course, there were all the times that she was just trying to “help him out” on a drug deal. And then those times that she had “cheated” when a friend of his came by and locked her in the bedroom. At the end of her description, the social worker had to try and explain that this woman didn’t have a relationship, or a boyfriend: she had a pimp.

I suspect I’m going to have a similar experience once I start conducting these interviews, and will have to hear all the words and phrases girls use to euphemize, using the words “love” and “boyfriend” to soften the impact of “abuse” and “child rapist.” I suspect I’m going to hear from these girls what I hear from the trolls whose comments I delete: she liked it, she deserved it, they were dating, she loves him, he loves her, it’s not a big deal, it didn’t even hurt. Being alone at the clinic, at Department X, that hurts a little, but it’s her own fault, you know? She should’ve known better. She should’ve made him wear a condom. She should’ve fought back, except he told her not to.

For all the trolls who wonder, I do sometimes think maybe I’m too focused on rape culture. I do sometimes think I’m seeing it behind every interaction, every movie poster, every offensive joke. I do sometimes wonder if I should try and turn my sexism filter off, and just enjoy Muppets in Manhattan without being super annoyed by all the casual sexism on parade, if I could stop being all feminist so I don’t have to stop watching A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints after ten minutes because hey, I’m pretty sure that’s rape, and not a treasured memory of your fascinating boyhood and the girls from the block.

Sometimes I really wish I could do that. But it’s impossible to ignore rape culture when it calls and makes an appointment, in a whisper and obviously hiding in a closet. When it arrives late on the bus, alone and lost. When it walks in the front door, comes over to your desk, and whispers on the verge of tears, “I need, um, I need, I need the thing.” It’s hard to ignore when it’s curled up in your lobby, unresponsive and unwilling to come back, to interact with you or any representative of the world. It’s hard to ignore when it’s made manifest in a real live girl, a real live girl who has been stripped of the right to disallow strangers access to everything from the waist down. I am acutely aware that many of these girls have been violated, and that I constitute a further violation; my presence announces to them that not only are they not allowed to choose when and with whom they have sex, but they are not allowed to choose how to deal with the consequences of being abused. All I did was pass a job interview, and I am temporarily LordGodKing of her uterus. All she did was own the uterus; why should she get to decide what to do with it? It’s not like she can type up the paperwork. She doesn’t even have a desk.

My New Job

So, my new job creates some blog problems. I’m working for the state government. My department is one of the many parties that becomes involves when a child has been removed from their home due to allegations of child abuse or neglect. I’m working mostly in a support personnel function. I’m not directly involved in the work involved in removing the children, placing the children, creating case plans, finding permanency, etc. That’s stuff for social workers, lawyers, judges, and advocates, and I am not any of those. I am the person who makes sure the paperwork of the social workers, lawyers, judges, and advocates is done correctly and efficiently, and gets filed where it’s supposed to. That sounds pretty boring, but believe me, it’s what I really enjoy the best. I don’t think I have that thing that can make me deal with the front line; what I do have is a fascination with information, organization, and supply lines, and that makes me ideal for being the person who supplies and furnishes the front line, so that’s what I do.

This also means that I have access to a lot of very confidential information. Such as: on my work computer, there is a software program that allows me to look up the details of any court case that has ever happened in my state. Such as: when I attend court hearings to familiarize myself with the process, I have access to documents that only relevant parties to the case have access to, and this includes some potentially very private information about the private and public figures in the court room.

I have just gone back and edited a few of my old posts that made more specific references to the job I have and what I do. I’ll be returning to some of my old posts and redacting other information. At my previous job, I had grapevine access to potentially confidential information, otherwise known as gossip. Gossip is already in the public sphere, whether it should or shouldn’t be, so posts I already made relating some vague gossip or anecdote aren’t exactly wrong or problematic. But now that I have a job where I have access to things that should never be in the public sphere, I want to make sure I avoid even the mistaken impression that I have revealed something confidential and inaccessible to those without a security pass. This is partially to cover my own ass, but mostly out of respect for the responsibilities I have; as a representative of a government, I want to illustrate that I take privacy very seriously.

That’s a long explanation for this: you may see the word [redacted] popping up in some old blog posts as time goes on.

Now that that’s out of the way.

So! Like I said, my new job involves some work with the courts. Good lord, courts are an archaic fucking maze. It’s been equal parts fascinating and exhausting to learn about how courts actually work, down to the day-to-day crummy details. I’ve encountered more than a few surprises when realizing just how different the reality is from my general perception as a citizen mostly uninvolved with court processes. I’ll never again be able to hear somebody say, “Well, just take them to court!” as a vague answer to a vague dispute without jumping in like an asshole to tell them just how much of their life that’s going to suck out like an open hatch on a rocket ship.

I’ve been allowed to sit in on court proceedings, and read court documents, and I have unfettered access to court opinions and procedures. That last bit isn’t confidential, really, but unless you’ve had some serious dealings with the courts, it’s never stuff that really makes it to the public sphere, because god, who wants to know? I have learned a lot about the wide gulf between the legislature and the courts, and how one poorly-defined word in one poorly-defined bill turns into a new government department and millions of new tax dollars to pay for industrial-grade covers for everybody’s ass. I have also learned a lot about turning printed words on a bill into a daily process, and how the best way to understand how the law actually works is to ask the law clerk who runs the files. And I assure you the law rarely works in the way you imagine it, with structure and forethought and flow charts — usually it works because one person in one department said, “Okay, let’s do it this way,” and nobody else disagreed, because they didn’t want the extra work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked, “But why do we do it this way?” and gotten as an answer, “Because Tracy used to work up in records, and that’s how she liked the forms to look, and I guess we just never changed it. I guess it doesn’t make sense, now that you point it out.”

I’ve been really interested in learning about the alternative life I could have had. When I ran away, I avoided courts and social workers completely. I’ve often wondered if that was the right decision. At the time, I didn’t know how to verbalize that what I experienced was abuse, and nobody seemed to know how to ask me the right questions, which could have barred me from getting the resources I really needed. I also had very short-term goals: stay away from my father, find somebody willing to feed me, find a bed to sleep in, don’t get pregnant, don’t do drugs, get to school tomorrow. I couldn’t even conceive of long-term goals like getting to college, learning job skills, getting therapy. That’s all stuff I think going to court could have gotten me, but only after jeopardizing — or taking out of my control — some of my short-term goals, and I was too terrified to do that. Which led to me holding on to anything and anybody that could achieve my short-term goals, which led to Flint and his family. So, you see why I wonder what could have been.

After I ran away, I developed an intense interest in medical rights and access. If I got pregnant, as a teenage runaway not in the system, could I get an abortion? It wasn’t an academi subject, and every time I read a newspaper article about a new restrictive law for minors, I got physically ill. I searched out information on DIY abortions, along with DIY dentistry and medical interventions, all things I wasn’t sure I could get if I needed them. I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to perform an abortion by myself, much like I couldn’t perform dentistry for myself, but if it came down to it, I was pretty sure I could figure out how to fuck up bad enough to go to the emergency room but not bad enough to kill myself. That would be enough to force the hand of doctors, insurance agents, and the law, and I could get the care I needed with hopefully few remaining injuries. I just want to emphasize: I had nights where I forced myself through methodical daydreams about how I would pull teeth out of my own head with pliers, because I felt I had to be mentally prepared to injure myself enough to acquire medical attention without my father’s permission. I had nights where I reviewed where I could most quickly acquire the tools to create a failed abortion, if I had to get up out of bed and run to do it right that minute; I knew, somewhere in me, that not having sex with Flint wasn’t an option if I also wanted food and a bed to sleep in once I turned 18, so I had to be prepared for the consequences of that. So I hope you can understand why I am 100% against restrictions on minors acquiring medical care without parental notification or consent; this is not an academic or moral or legal or ethical issue for me. This is a body memory of where the closest places to buy knitting needles are, and how late those places are open, and who I could potentially con five dollars out of, and what excuse I could give them.

So, I’ve taken some of my time at work to learn about this state’s current restrictions on abortion care for minors. How it plays out in the courts is probably very different from how it plays out in your mind, and I wanted to lay out some information I found pretty interesting.

In my state, minors are required to notify their parents. They are not required to have parental consent, only notification. The notification has to occur before the procedure. Both parents have to be notified. There is a judicial bypass procedure, where the minor can go to court and petition a judge to allow her to bypass the requirement for notification. Before working here, that’s about all I knew. Probably that’s all most of you know.

Let’s start with a case example to move you through every aspect of how this actually works. I’m going to note the places I was surprised.

Let’s say you have a girl, we’ll call her Laura. Laura is 15 years old. She lives with her mother in a small town. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her father is somewhere in California. Laura is pregnant.

Laura calls her local hospital to ask if they provide abortion services. They do not. They tell her she must notify her parents. Laura states she doesn’t want to tell her mother, and the hospital tells her she’ll need a judicial bypass as well as an abortion. Laura calls her local courthouse and asks about judicial bypasses. They tell her that yes, she’ll need one, but no, they’re not sure how to provide one — they’ve never done it, and the judges refuse.

Surprise #1: Just because a service is required by law doesn’t mean there is anybody available to provide it. The law says that Laura is allowed to seek a judicial bypass — the law does not say that a judge is required to be available to provide one. Laura has the right to ask, but not to receive.

Surprise #2: Lots of judges refuse to process judicial bypasses. It’s not a requirement; judges are not forced to take every case presented. Many judges have no idea how to process a judicial bypass — they’ve never been trained. And many judges refuse because it comes up during election time: Did you know Judge Adam A. Adamson allowed 20 young girls to get abortions last year? Do you want a baby-killer on the court?

Additionally, if a judge has a personal pro-life conviction, they may simply refuse to take bypass cases. Even though a bypass only allows a girl to not notify her parents if she seeks an abortion, and does not legally mandate abortions, and even though this shit is their fucking jobs, these judges find that to be splitting ethical hairs. This is not a slur against pro-lifers — there is a pro-life conservative judge on our court, but you would never know it from the way they run their cases, because they run their cases like a judge and not like somebody with a personal agenda — this is a slur against judges who refuse to do their jobs due to personal convictions. Don’t be a fucking judge, then.

Laura’s local court system tells her that the courts in the main city will process judicial bypasses. Additionally, the hospital told Laura that the closest clinic that provides abortion services is also located in the main city, Cityville. It’s about four hours away. She’ll need to acquire transportation and possibly overnight lodgings.

Laura bites the bullet. She tells her mother. Though there’s a lot more conversations the two of them need to have, Laura’s mother agrees that abortion is the best option, and agrees to drive her to Cityville. The next day, Laura and her mother head to a clinic in Cityville. Laura speaks to a counselor privately, who assures her that their talk is confidential. She and the counselor discuss her options, and how she feels about them. The counselor determintes that Laura is of sound mind, aware of her decisions and their impacts, and still desires the abortion.

The counselor then tells her she’ll need to visit the county courthouse for a judicial bypass. Laura and her mother are confused. Her mother is standing right there with her in the clinic. Ah, yes, but where is her father? Her father must also be notified. Laura’s mother paws through her purse and finds the last known number for Laura’s father. She makes phone calls for about an hour, finally managing to track him down. She hands the phone to a clinic worker. Laura’s father identifies himself, and the clinic worker notifies him that his daughter is acquiring an abortion. Laura’s father immediately states that he is not Laura’s father, then hangs up.

In the meantime, Laura’s mother is trying to establish that she is, in fact, Laura’s mother. She has a SS card, but it lists her married name, and she has been divorced for a few years. She didn’t think to bring Laura’s birth certificate. The clinic cannot effectively establish that Laura is legally her mother’s daughter. That, coupled with the fact that Laura’s father refuses to admit he is Laura’s father and has effectively been notified, means that Laura (whose parents both know she is acquiring an abortion) must now seek a judicial bypass for parental notification.

Surprise #3: The law does not clearly state how to establish maternity or paternity. However, the law does clearly state rather extensive punishments for the clinic or doctor who performs an abortion without having established maternity or paternity of the minor. Thus, clinics may enact excessive bureaucratic measures to ensure beyond any legal doubt that a minor’s parents are actually a minor’s legal parents. So, you can (and do) have the situation where a girl’s mother and father come to the clinic with her, but do not have IDs, social security cards, or birth certificates, so the clinic sends the girl to the courthouse, since she is legally unable to notify her parents, who are standing next to her.

Surprise #4: The law also refuses to clearly state what “notification” is. Is it a phone call? Is it a letter? Is it a signed letter? Is it a signed and notarized letter? Again, clinics have no guidelines to ensure their compliance with the law, but they do know that non-compliance with the law will have them shut down. So, a girl can come in to a clinic with both of her parents, but if one of her parents refuses to sign a piece of paper stating that they have been informed of her abortion, she must go to the courthouse.

The clinic calls the local courthouse to try and find out which department is now handling judicial bypasses.

Surprise #5: The law does not state who is in charge of the paperwork and process of a judicial bypass. This is the same as Surprise #1 — a service may be mandated, but unless a service provider is also mandated, you do not have a service. That is, Laura has the right to seek a judicial bypass, but she does not have the right to a law clerk who will fill out and process her paperwork, which effectively means Laura may not have access to her rights.

Since the law does not state which department should process this procedure, in my state, a department has volunteered. There is no really definitive reason why this department should be processing judicial bypasses — they are not the department in charge of young ladies or something — they are just the one department that stated they would do it, so every other department that would have been more appropriate just washed their hands of it. This department tries to keep their work on the DL, since there’s always the concern that it’ll come out during budget hearings, and there will be obsessive picketing leading to a shutdown of their department, a la “Do you want your tax money going to baby-killers?” etc. Again, since no department is legally required to perform this procedure, and since it’s a politically volatile topic, no department wants to perform this procedure. Which means Laura has the right to a bypass, but potentially no ability to access it through the public system that refuses to engage in what is a completely legal process.

The clinic locates the appropriate department, which tells them bypasses are only being processed on Mondays and Wednesdays, because the judges hate doing them on Tuesdays. Laura and her mother will have to stay the night.

On Wednesday, Laura and her mother head down to the county courthouse. They locate the proper department and sign a few forms. An employee interviews Laura separately about her decision — if she is of sound mind to request an abortion, and why she is requesting a judicial bypass. The interviewer is surprised that Laura was sent to the county courthouse, since her mother had an ID, and her father answered the phone. The interviewer worries that the judge won’t approve the bypass.

Surprise #6: Since the law does not clearly state what “notification” is or how to establish legal parents, states with a judicial bypass laws create clinics that send minors to court at the first sign of any minor hitch. Again, clinics have no guidelines for compliance, but are subject to consequences if non-compliant. This means that, to legally cover themselves, clinics will often send minors who don’t need judicial bypasses to court. Not only is this a major funding drain on taxpayers — court is fucking expensive — it also runs the risk that the judge will refuse to hear the case or deny the bypass.

If the judge feels that notification and paternity has been reasonably established, they will not deliver a spurious judgment. If the judge refused to hear the case, the girl must now find a clinic willing to perform the abortion with the circumstances she has, or must return to court and re-argue her case in front of the same judge or a new judge. If the judge denied the bypass, the girl must find a clinic that will consider her circumstances as legal enough. If she cannot, she cannot acquire an abortion.

Surprise #7: She can appeal the judge’s decision, though, right? Yes, technically. She has the right to a public defender. But, again, the right to a service does not guarantee access to a service. In my state, public defenders refuse to take these cases anymore. Initially, they stopped taking them because they were never really required; most judges give the girls the bypass, unless they feel there’s coercion going on. But once they had stopped taking them, they ran out of defenders who were trained to take bypass cases. Additionally, taking these cases looks bad for them. You’d think a public defender — who may also, in their lifetime, defend people who have committed abhorrent crimes — would not be so concerned with public perception, but when was the last time a building that provided rehabilitative services to sex offenders bombed, or had their therapists shot in church?

So, a girl has the right to a public defender, but if there are no public defenders available, she has no access to her rights.

The interviewer asks Laura why she did not initially want to tell her mother, and Laura tells her the same thing she told the clinic worker: she thinks the baby might be her uncle’s, and he has been sexually abusing her for years. The interviewer, stunned, tells Laura that he is a mandated reporter and is legally required to report this to CPS. Laura is also stunned; the clinic worker had told her the interview was confidential. The interviewer now understands why the clinic sent Laura to them.

Surprise #8: Clinics deal with a lot of politically volatile issues. They conserve their efforts, and one can’t blame them. In my state, if a clinic suspects anything is awry with a minor, they will send them to court and let the court personnel suss it out. This also sometimes means that court personnel must tell a minor — who has previously been told everything she says is confidential — that they will, in fact, have to report her to CPS. Minors who know about this in advance do not attempt to seek abortions, or do not attempt to seek legal abortions, in order to protect their families. Clinics know this, and would rather that minors think “the state” called CPS, and not the clinic.

The interviewer puts in a call to Child Protective Services. Laura is removed from her mother’s care, and made a ward of the state. Laura’s parent is now officially the state. The clinic is able to notify Laura’s social worker that Laura is attempting to acquire an abortion. Laura is now able to acquire an abortion.

Okay, here’s Surprise #9: Up until the child abuse angle, I just gave you a very typical story. That’s not to say the child abuse angle doesn’t happen — it does — but it’s not as common for the child abuse angle to come out during a judicial bypass proceeding.

But let’s take a different angle on the story. Let’s say Laura never tells her mother. She manages to get a ride to Cityville, and manages to seek a bypass that day. However, she is far enough along that she requires a two-day procedure. The first day, she receives implants that will widen her cervix and cause spontaneous miscarriage. The second day, doctors will ensure the procedure took, and remove the implants. She can’t stay the night in Cityville. She doesn’t go in the next day. She spontaneously miscarries at home, and goes to the ER. She does not tell the ER doctor that she had an abortion. The ER doctor does not know to look for the implants, and leaves them in her uterus. I won’t go into the complications that can ensue from here. Rest assured, they are fucking gruesome. But this angle is less about the judicial bypass, and more about the lack of doctors and hospitals that will perform abortion services. That’s a whole nother blog post of anger.

So, welcome to the reality of legal restrictions on medical services to teenagers! This is a thing to keep in mind whenever you read about a new law taking shape or being passed. If the new law does not explicitly identify standards and procedures, and if it does not explicitly identify service providers, and if those service providers do not actually exist in your community, you now have a pretty good idea of the intentions of the lawmakers. Passing a law that is undefined and inaccessible is passing a law you don’t want to see enforced. When lawmakers passed this notification law, they didn’t want girls to actually be able to acquire bypasses. They didn’t even care if girls notified their parents. If they had cared about these things, the law would have actually addressed what “notification” means, what “parents” mean, and who provides bypasses. It did not address these things, because these were not the things lawmakers actually wanted to see happen. The lawmakers purposefully made a law where it is impossible to ensure compliance, but is entirely possible to be punished for non-compliance. They made it this way because they did not want to see compliance. They wanted to see a full stop.

Laws restricting access to medical services are laws restricting access to medical services. They are not laws creating family talks, better worlds, or moral teenagers. They are laws creating restrictions to medical services, which people do not seek unless they need them. Laws creating restrictions to medical services are laws creating restrictions to services people need and need desperately. You can argue that the lawmakers had some kind of noble intentions in mind — I will not buy it, but you can argue that. But you cannot argue that once the law has been in effect and created an inability to comply, and yet remained unchanged. If this was a law about notifying parents, it would have addressed how to notify parents. If this was a law about how to seek a bypass, it would have addressed how to seek a bypass. Since it didn’t address either of those things, this is obviously a law about something else. You only get one guess about what that something else is.

No, I Do Not Exist

Still adjusting. My new job is awesome, but very tiring, and very confidential. I’m still sussing out just how much to talk about, and whether or not talking about it will also necessitate me breaking my golden rule and deleting or redacting some of my earlier posts that relate to work. Not because they are suddenly bad posts, but because as a government employee working in a very sensitive area, I recognize that my opinions and what I choose to share might have more weight than it really ought to. So, it’s a dance, and I haven’t bothered learning it yet.

Because I am busy! My new job requires a new commute, and a new schedule, which has eaten a full hour of what used to be my free time. I didn’t think that one hour could make such a difference, but until I adjust, it seems like every minute of my time is spent feeding, bathing, and clothing myself for work the next day. Which sounds pretty whiny — everybody has to do that — but I am coming from the Job O’ Doom where I had the ability to make drearily long blog posts just about every day, when I wasn’t making CD mixes, that is. I have been learning in this last year about priorities, which was a bit of a theoretical word when I had all the free time in the world to meet all my priorities, but was just too full of ennui to do so. Now it is not theoretical — I only have so much time a day — and my priorities don’t include blogging right now, or at least not in the way I used to. Maybe I will learn brevity! And we all laugh.

I just wanted to pop in to say:

Last night I watched the movie Opapatika, which is a Thai fantasy-action film that turned out to be much more entertaining, complex, and poignant than its poorly chosen English translation (STREET DEMONS) and its Netflix-written summary (STREET DEMONS FIGHT IN OTHERWORLD) may have otherwise indicated.

I was really struck by some of the gendered features of the film, even though it failed the Bechdel test enormously (which was no surprise). Afterwards, I tallied up in my head all the surprising features, and then spent a moment feeling really sad that these things add up to a pleasant and notable surprise, instead of run-of-the-mill treatment. The movie featured:

1. A standard women-in-refrigerators subplot for one main character, which was not notable at all. However, the actual “refrigerator” scene made it obvious that a rape had occurred, and yet somehow resisted all temptation to show the rape, show boobs, or show anything sexual at all, even if only to accentuate the horror-sex of the rape. A main character walked in on the tail end of his wife’s murder, which was obviously following a rape. The murder scene was incredibly brief (you got to see her punched three times by the intruder, though she had obviously been beaten before the scene began), and even though she was only wearing a bra, at no point did you see more skin than her tummy and her shoulders. The entire scene obviously revolved around her husband and his point of view, which meant we only saw what he saw — and since he was more invested in attempting to save her life, killing her murderer, and cradling her corpse in his arms, we weren’t treated to a montage of skin flashes, her face in pain, or (the thing I hate the most) some part of her body moving jerkily up and down as the rapist thrusts. I could live without ever seeing that one again. I can only think of two other movies that depicted a rape scene without those quasi-pornographic calling cards (Osama and Turtles Can Fly, TRIGGER WARNING TIMES A THOUSAND ANYWAY).
2. There was a Jekyll/Hyde type character who, at night, turned into a horrible beast man who did horrible things. The film depicted the aftermath of his horrible acts, and once or twice showed some second-long flashes of things he remembered doing the night before. The gore was kept remarkably low, and the only time a woman is shown in his memories, there was only a half-second shot of him pulling a rope to lynch her. You don’t even get to see her dress, her body, or anything — you only know it’s a woman by the scream. I am amazed that the director managed to resist the temptation to illustrate just how evil he is by showing him raping a woman, or showing a woman who has obviously been raped. I can pretty well assume that in his nightly retinue of evil, he doesn’t cross rape off the list as too evil — but I didn’t need to see it to understand that point, and they didn’t try to show it to me.
3. There was a main female character who caused a significant amount of confusion and problems (some romantic) for almost all of the male characters. One even hated her. Nobody called her a bitch, or any other insult based in femaleness. This reminded me of the remake of Dawn of the Dead. At the very end, one of the asshole guy characters stays behind in their getaway vehicle to draw off the hordes. He’s wounded, and all he has is a gun. The zombies keep rushing in, and he keeps shooting them. At one point, the camera is behind his head (we can’t see his face) and a female zombie rushes on the bus. He shouts, “Bitch!” in a tone so jarring and loud that it’s obvious it was recorded and patched in after-the-fact, when some exec or focus group decided that maybe we didn’t notice that he was specifically killing a woman, and maybe we should. So you can see, when the standard is to add extra gendered slurs wherever they can fit, that a movie where a bunch of guys confront a woman angrily and nobody calls her a name is just some kind of amazing.

I don’t know when the last time I saw a movie that didn’t either 1) make sure we notice a female character is female by calling her a female insult, 2) depict a rape in unnecessary visual detail, and/or 3) establish a male character’s motivations/feelings/beliefs by showing him doing something unspeakably cruel to a woman who is awfully sexy for no particular reason. It is not like evil Jekyll/Hyde characters can’t rape men, for god’s sake, but we don’t use that to show their evilness, because then they would be evil and gay and that’s somehow worse than seeing them eat eyeballs?

Christ, I have to go to bed. This new schedule is death.