The inescapable, meaningless state.

Others define it with certainty, and they’re lying – maybe (more kindly) whistling in the dark.

I reject essentialism until I am forcibly reduced to it. So now when I am on the ballot, the subject of stirring speeches, I take stock again.

I know this thing I am does not exclude, or set me against, those whose bodies or genders are not like mine. It is only the state of myself, the experience that I am personally having every day, in which I am not alone.

First it is being born into a body that is immediately sorted into an oppressed class based on the visual presentation of the genitalia. Then, it is not knowing this for a while, complying with this identification in the soup of infancy and early childhood when we know only what we are told. Finally, it is self-awareness. Adjusting to living in this body in states of alternating abundance and self-defense.

Not finally: the final act will be dying in this body.

I love my life in this body. I treasure it and cherish it and use it, and I know that its continued existence is not guaranteed. I know this for many reasons but learned it when I was ten and my mother got sick.

I watched her live and die in a body that bled and birthed and nursed, played tennis and painted the kitchen, mowed the lawn and moved the furniture, all while carrying around the electric company of her brain. She read and wrote and fought and suffered and laughed and cried and saw it all, and drank so she could stop seeing.

I watched her strong body invaded by cancer, sliced and chopped, burned by monstrous 1980 chemotherapy, and left to die. Which she did not do for an admirably long time. Her body was female and wounded, but it struggled mightily to survive right up until it simply could not sustain any longer. Her body held me, so now I hold it inside what I know and what I am, and I do not forsake it.

All of which to say: I have reverence for my female body, my mother’s female body. This has expanded into an intimacy and affinity with female bodies in general.

Never to the hostile exclusion of males. I birthed a son, whose body is now where my life is. I was raised by a beloved father, and I passionately love a male mate. I honor male bodies, trans bodies, intersex bodies. I am a reverent student of bodies and the ways we live in them.

But born-female bodies are my obsession. Especially now, when we are once again hard up against how urgently our culture fears them.

Women live in our bodies as people, not mothers or caretakers. There is no essential female experience.

But there is the bleeding. The swelling. The cycles. There is the patrolling, the judging, the harm we do to ourselves, the harm that is done to us. The secret pleasures, the public displays. There are the ways we respond when we are met with hunger, ownership, repulsion, rejection. The decisions we make about what to wear and how to perform ablutions. The hair, the skin, the fat, the curves and lines.

There is the managing, the acceptance. The lifetime of daily dealings with this ever-presenting condition.

And then there is pregnancy. And birth. And the state of being “mother”.
The choices we defend like a fortress, and the surrenders that we credit to destiny.

There is each moment containing both holiness and humiliation, transcendence and rage, always the shark and dolphin swimming so closely side by side that they are a single streak in the water.

The sustained tension between two states, flip-flopping over and over again, like an ambiguous image, like a Necker Cube.

Being a woman, being female like THIS in THIS time in THIS kind of body with THIS experience, is this rocking between poles, with only fleeting moments of balanced middle vision.

Perhaps it is the core meat of this, our centrality in the story, the hero’s journey of a female body, that leaves those beyond the fray desperate to step into it and take the power, control the outcome, occupy the center. I don’t care anymore why they do it, I only hold the facts and resist the invasion.

I hold steady that there is puberty, there is menopause.
There is miscarriage. 
There is abortion.

I stand in this: we know what abortion is.
We have lived in these bodies. 

We know the blood and the tissue and the shit and the slime. 
We know the pristine curve of a fuzzy cheek, glowing with every kind of light.

We know the nubbin of a toe, the whisper of an eyelash.
We know the awe.
The passionate certainty that all of life has led to this, that we would die for the life of this child.

We know the desperate NO when our bodies have been colonized, when it isn’t right, it isn’t time, it doesn’t belong.

We know the obliteration, the devouring black hole beyond grief when we have willingly, joyfully given every cell, every bite of food, every breath to growing a body, and that body dies.

We know the pain of broken bones, lost teeth, broken hearts, desperate need. We know the warmth of holding. We know about having children and being children, we know the unvarnished triumph and tragedy of learning to be alive.

We know. In this story we are the protagonists, we drive the action. We hold all the cards and every key.

And so in the quiet, after all the effort, with no more cajoling or convincing or conquering to do…I sit in this truth and I speak it.

We know what life is. And you know we know.  And you cannot bear it.

We can. We bear it. That, above all else, is who we are.
That cannot be forced away, that will never be otherwise.

Try to vote it otherwise. Try to break us down with terror.
You can’t. You have no power over this.
I can even pity you when I remember:
this is a truth that simply is, uncrushable by the likes of you.