Choices

 I'm so angry.

Every woman in America should be this angry--but some of you aren't and now I'm pissed at you.

I mostly blog for myself these days--I don't use it for an advertising platform much, and my kids have gotten to the point where their oddness and absurdity can be captured in a brief FB post. They also loathe having their pictures taken, so, you know. Blogs aren't quite the medium. But right now I'm mad, and I'm trying to write and this anger keeps getting in the way and I need to get it out. I can't HAPPY EVER AFTER right now, when my inside keeps turning with HOW FUCKING DARE THEY. 

When I was a kid growing up in the Nor-Cal bible belt, my parents may have been liberal, but abortion was wrong. All my friends said so. But then, you know, you grow up, and people start going, "Yeah, except for rape. It should be legal then. Or incest. I mean, when the woman has no choice--it's not her fault." And then you think, "Well, what about people who are really young--fifteen is too young to have a baby--there should be something about that in there." Or, "What if she doesn't have the means? It sucked growing up poor, but my parents had access to a brighter day--what if you can't have that brighter day with a kid at your heels?" Or, "Well, also if her health is at risk. Definitely if her health is at risk." Or even, horribly, "And definitely if the baby is dead or brain dead--it would be HORRIFYING to have to walk around with a rotting corpse inside your body while you tried to grieve."

And then it occurred to me. I was maybe fourteen. "Well, who gets to make these decisions? If a woman is too young, too broke, too old, too sick, too much of mess, too non-consenting to have a child, who gets to say? Does she have to go in front of a panel of old white guys and spill out her entire life's story to explain why she doesn't need to have this baby right now? Seriously, who the fuck are they to judge this hypothetical woman?"

Who the fuck are they?

Who the fuck was I? 

And like that, I realized why my parents had protested the government. 

Fast forward a reproductive lifetime to when I was thirty-eight. Mate and I, in a fit of miscalculation absolutely laughable in two college educated parents of three, find ourselves pregnant. AGAIN. Holy shit! It took us nine years to get pregnant with Thing 3, and suddenly, two years later, we're pregnant with Thing 4? We ASSUMED we'd have another nine years, and in that time, well, we'd close down the baby factory because we have plans for our late fifties and they mostly include us being able to go places without our children. But pregnant with Thing 4 we were--and make no mistake. We were THRILLED. We had no place to put this baby--but we'd figure it out. We both had jobs. We were resourceful. And Jesus, the house was already a fucking madhouse.

But it was not all baby glow and universe juice.

I was THIRTY-FUCKING-EIGHT years old. This is vastly different than twenty-five in baby-pushing years. I was exhausted. Everything hurt. Thing 3 was not talking yet, Things 1 and 2 were in Junior High and boy wasn't THAT a treat, my job SUCKED, my administration had already proved they hated pregnant women and wanted to kill them with fire, and I was SO FUCKING FAT. (I did not yet know how much fatter I could become. Youth is wasted on the young.) My blood sugar was circling the drain, and I'd developed ulcerative colitis. (All the Itis brothers suck btw--Col Itis, Arthur Itis, Bruce Itis--the entire family is just the fucking worst.) It was HARD having this baby. And still I wanted it. 

I MADE A CHOICE TO HAVE THIS BABY. 

It was a choice of privilege--yes, I would have given my life to have the baby, but I was fortunate because my husband was not an abusive douchebag. I COULD give my life for the baby because I knew he would care for our other children if things went terribly, terribly wrong. 

The fact is, if I hadn't felt like my other three children were safe with him, I could not have, in good conscience, carried through with that pregnancy. 

But all those things--all those factors--were MINE. They weren't for anybody else to decide. Not my parents--who were terrified during the entire pregnancy--and certainly not my government's. 

Mine. 

And fuck anybody who tried to take that choice away from me.

Fuck them now. FUCK. THEM. How dare they. 

How dare they legislate our bodies like this. My body is MINE, shitty choices, destroyed metabolism, all the fucking Itis brothers and all. It's the only body I know how to use. I feel INVADED by this Supreme Court decision, like suddenly all of my choices are under scrutiny, as though I have to appeal to that intimidating panel of judgy fucking assholes for everything from my pap smear to my mammogram. And I'm not even of reproductive age anymore. How do my children feel? They are growing up in a world where their only choice requires cash expenditures for a Kevlar vest. And, yes, fuck you SCOTUS for that choice too?

But the idiotic fucking gun law repeals are wholesale slaughter--and for better or worse, that feels less personal than this. The Roe V Wade involves the creepy wrinkled fingers of Mitch McConnel and Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and the Big Liar himself all crawling around my body, my privates, my womb. They're oozing along my children's bodies, their choices, their sexuality, their personhood, and they've all aimed the Uzi at my head to stop me from protecting my babies.

The overturning of Roe V. Wade is that evil. It's that pernicious. It's that GROSS.  And I don't have any answers besides vote and donate and shake my chubby fist at the sky and howl.

Dear conservative SCOTUS members--  Fuck you. Fuck you all. How dare you. Eat shit and die. Fuck yourselves with an anchor. Choke on your own vomit. I hope demons rip your bladder sout through your urethras and shove them up your noses. I hope your faces fall off with syphilis and all your cronies laugh and judge you while pushing their oozing wrinkly wizened fingers up your assholes and squeeze your shriveled wieners. 

I just want you all to know how WE feel.

Sincerely, women everywhere. 

The end.