Letter To My Rage

My Mother's Body

    Dear Rage, my eternal internal electrical storm.I wonder, did you present at birth?Was there perhaps something slightly more than the wail of an infant in that first guttural screech, something left of animal before its transformation?
  Did the sound reach back toward a different species, a longing to be something other than human, something in the belly of the mother waters, or forward into the fight that was coming?There is a woman more than six feet away from me in a waiting room at a clinic. The woman is breastfeeding a baby, its little hands opening and closing. The woman is also balancing a laptop on her thighs; the baby hangs in a sling-type thing that women who are smarter than me figure out, unlike when I carried an infant, twenty years ago. The woman also has a small—very small—dog on a leash curled at her feet.
They let dogs in clinics now? Is it an emotional support animal perhaps? Or just the fact that we are all in pandemic mode, so rules are bending?
    I keep imagining the terrible moment when they call her name—will there be a cataclysmic tumult of laptop, dog, and baby? Will I rush over to help her or stay a good-stranger distance away?The nursing woman is wearing a mask. The nurse behind the glass is wearing a mask. I am wearing a mask. The baby is not wearing a mask, its head is soft, like baby’s heads are, and it’s sucking a boob, which is as it should be. The dog is not wearing a mask, but animals make me feel better about everything lately. The surge and song of them. How they are filling the streets and squares and trees and trails and oceans and rivers … and waiting rooms.On the television, the pathetic president is not wearing a mask. He looks obscene. Like his face is an anus.
  beyond angry.I’m so filled with you, Rage, I’m having trouble figuring out how to route the anger so I don’t short-circuit myself and spontaneously combust. I’m angry at the irresponsible responses to a virus ravaging our loved ones. I’m angry that police brutalize Black people like they are gunning for Facebook likes. I’m angry at the pisspoor president, some sorry-ass excuse of a meat sack in an ill-fitting suit. His image makes my language go strange and tight: immoral repugnant boil. I’m angry at the individuals and institutions and corporations that prop this gasbag fucker up. I’m angry at the gun-toting Rambo wannabes who get dressed up and threaten women and children, like they are storming the castle, like they are proud and free men fighting for their rights, rather than fighting for the right to irresponsibly kill everyone near them with their own ignorance and violence.
   They wouldn’t know freedom if it bit them on the ass. They are too busy dominating everyone like angry, purpling cocks. They are trapped inside a need for violence in the face of their disappearing power.
   I’m angry about the fact that nurses and doctors and hospital and medical personnel cannot get the protective equipment they need to be safe while they save our lives. I’m angry that Black people and Indigenous people are disproportionately impacted both by this virus and by systemic racism and bigotry. I’m angry because murdering Black people in the street for existing is again on the rise, reminding me that it never wasn’t. I’m angry that Asian Americans are being targeted, Muslims, queers. I hate our presenttense xenophobia and bigotry on parade passionately. I hate the entire penal system and secretly harbor breakout fantasies, including night vision goggles and zip lines. I want tobring the bolt cutters to all detentions centers before we kill everyone we have caged.
  I am angry there are women who support male domination in all its forms—faith, father, family, stateagainst their own interests, against their own bodies, voices, lives.The baby across from me pauses its sucking and casts a wary eye my way. I know this baby is too young to “see” anything yet. And yet babies are sly. Can she see my rage? Plus I read this morning about a possible parallel universe where time moves backwards.
  Maybe babies know something we don’t. Maybe their vulnerability and innocence are wisdom. Was it there at the beginning of me? Was my rage a strange invisible twin that kept me company in the womb and then held on too tight inside the caul until our bodies merged, she wanted out, she wanted light, she wanted body, she wanted breath,motherfuckers?Was it already there when they lifted me by cesarean from my mother’s gut, lodged as I was inside her too tilted pelvis, strange crooked cradle, my mother born with one leg more than six inches shorter than the other, her daughters cut from her body, my sister first, then me years later. Was my rage born of the missed opportunity to wrestle free through the birth canal, through the open mouth of my mother?Or was my rage my mother’s? Or her mother’s? Or hers?
  An inherited creature?Mother, you were the saddest person I have ever known.Mother, you were the most joyful person I have ever known.That storm. That meeting of extremes.Was there something in between the sadness and joy? A raging silence?I loved you. I raged at you.
  They say a woman’s rage is monstrous, but is it? Maybe the rage of men is simply held in easier holstersan angry man can win a war, win a sporting event, an angry man’s ambition is rewarded, legitimized; even when he ugly-cries and whines like a man-baby before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the world to see, he ascends to judicial ranks.
Where can a woman carry her rage but in her body?What is the woman who’s sitting her safe distance across from me, perched precariously on the edge of her future with motherhood and a laptop, thinking and feeling underneath her mask? Dog at her feet? Strange pietà.A physician’s assistant emerges from behind the safety glass. She doesn’t say anything. She walks across the carpet to the woman and reaches for the baby without a word. The breastfeeding mother acquiesces. I can tell they are both smiling because theyeach get crinkles to the sides of their eyes. The laptop does not crash to the floor. The dog does not run around barking chaotically. It is as seamless as I did not imagine.
  They disappear behind a door, the infant removed from the body of the mother on its journey toward health and wellness. In some ways I don’t think the mother or the baby will ever be the same, each of them entering the social order not set up for them every day from here on. To me the woman and the baby and the dog look like both hope and doom, simultaneously.
  Now all I can think about is blood and mothers and babies and bodies.My mother. My poor, sad, joyful, raging, dead mother.
  Weren’t you angry, Mother?
  What is the mother body besides the stories we’ve made of mothers?I look down and find that my hand is on my own belly. Women carry an alterity in their bellies—with orwithout children. We can do more than breed.
   I know; I’m old, so my blood is mine again.
  A childless woman or anyone who inhabits the space we call woman may carry her rage in the gut. A form of knowing, a gestating chance for change. The gut holds creation and destruction, asking What next? Could we use the power of our rage to de-story power and re-story something in its place?The woman behind the glass calls my name to test my blood for the antibody.In utero, babies’ hands often curl into tiny fists.
  Let rage rise in us differently this time.Let us find where to give good blood. 

So yes this is the  first part of my book. I know some people might find it complicating but this words are written from the depths of my heart and its all comes from my rage against certain things. Please feel free to comment and vote. XO XO