June 25, 2022--National Protest Day
Listen up, gurls. Your body has never been your own. Maybe it was for the first ten years or so, but there came a time when your best friend whispered in your ear about the ways of the world and things that men could do. So one day when you were safe back in your own bed, you may have reached down and tried it. And it was good. That is the only time your body may have been your own. Soon after that, you were probably at school when you first noticed the blood dripping out of you when you went to the restroom. If you hadn't previously been told differently, you may have thought your were dying. In fact you were dying--just in a different, albeit slower way than you would have thought. If you are of a certain age, you had been allowed to watch a dark and ominous film in your p.e. class about how natural it all was, but it has never seemed natural to you. In fact when you noticed it, that first time at school, your hands were shaking as you applied the pad with safety pins to your underpants, and then went to class and tried to carry on as if nothing was different. You felt certain that everyone could tell, that they could see the outline of what was happening underneath your clothing. Your body was not your own. Later, maybe you are twenty one years old and at university. The boy you are seeing wants you to sign up for swimming for a college credit. Not only do you kind of suck at swimming in general, but you have still not mastered the tampon. You just can't see yourself using one on a regular basis, but you have no skill to navigate a conversation regarding the reason why you will not sign up for the course. And that creates the first crack in a relationship that went no where fast. The opportunity was lost because your body was not your own. And then, later, maybe once, maybe twice, you found yourself in a compromising position. Both figuratively and literally. You may have had to extricate yourself from the car or the apartment by any means necessary as the boy you were with (and with whom you had no intention to marry) once again made you remember that your body was not your own. And so after a while, you did find the boy you were going to marry. And you find yourself with him in your doctor's office holding a dead and aborted fetus in the palm of your still shaking hand. You cannot understand why the child did not live past ten weeks, just like his two brothers before him. Your body is not your own. Never has been apparently. Not since you were twelve years old. Or thereabouts. Father's Day--June 19th, 2022
by Karen Schwabenland Father's Day is Sunday. My own dad has been dead now for two years, so I thought I would honor him by writing today's post. I am my father's daughter. I am often so busy thinking of how I am not like my dad, that I fail to see how we are the same. We are similar in ways that go beyond the surface. It's as if his ways of being have been ground into me, like grass clippings and plant prunings have been dumped into a compost bin. His habits are in my DNA. My dad was most likely on the spectrum. We all knew it, but no one spoke of it while he was still living. He never quite excelled at any of his jobs in his career, but he worked hard and got the tasks assigned to him done. He attended two years of Blinn College and received a degree in accounting, although he never worked in accounting in his life. I don't know how he managed to get through a program like accounting except that he probably liked the way that accounting numbers are finite. He didn't see the grey in life, only black and white. He could grow plants like crazy. He always had a vegetable garden at every house we ever lived in. Once, I bought a pumpkin to carve for Halloween. He thought that it was wasteful to only use a perfectly edible item as decoration. He got into an epic battle with my mom over it. She would not bake him a homemade pumpkin pie from scratch using the innards of that pumpkin. Who could blame her? Pumpkin pie filling was all over the supermarkets at that time of year. So finally, in exasperation over losing another argument to Mom, Dad took the pumpkin's guts and threw them into the flower bed that lined our patio. There they stayed. He wasn't planting them, just using them for some kind of compost. Mom did not clean them up either. The seeds and stringy inside of that pumpkin just sat in the flower bed for weeks, mocking both of them. Maybe there was a rainfall soon after. I don't know. All I know is that the next autumn, we had a vine of baby pumpkins. I was thrilled, thinking that from there on out I would have a Halloween pumpkin every year. Perhaps more than one. However, Dad didn't like the idea of growing food in a flower bed. I guess he also knew the pumpkins would not be appreciated to the fullest extent by anyone in the house. He tore out the pumpkin vine and planted something else in its place. How I am not like my dad in this story is that I don't grow plants very well. I have just simply given up altogether. Fake plants are my way to go, even in the hanging baskets on my back porch. They are cheap enough to replace each season. I would spend as much replacing real plants that failed to thrive under my watch. But here is how I am like my dad. He hated throwing out something that seemed perfectly useful to him. Or not using every single part of it. I am like that, even though it is hard for me to admit. Right now, in my secret garage freezer, there are frozen berries that are at least six years old. I should throw them out, but they are not taking up too much room. And the only person who is aware of them is me. I cannot bring myself to do it. I wonder how long frozen berries take to show signs of freezer burn or rot? When that happens I will reluctantly toss them I'm sure. Until then, you can't say I am keeping my dad out there in that freezer, but in some sense, I think I am. I really wish my dad could have found a job working in greenhouse or becoming the head gardener for some rich lady in River Oaks. He would have been completely in his element at it. Like some other people I know on the spectrum though, he never completely realized that his own God given talents were the thing he should have pursued for work. I chalk this way of thinking up to the whole idea of square pegs trying to fit into round holes. People with autism spend so much time and energy trying to blend into society's common ideals that they often fail to see and appreciate their own talents for the proverbial trees in the forest. Ironically, Dad would have been a great tree grower, too. |
AuthorKaren Schwabenland--Keeper of a daily blog of written matter, reporter of events large and small, and charlatan extraordinaire Archives
September 2022
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