Still Crying: "Spanking Time"

This peice is from an anonymous author.

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Its funny how a child can turn anything into a game. 
My brother and i wrote  a song called Spanking Time. 

We usually played a game called court; where the whole point was catching the evildoer in their crime and then punishing them. 

The most exciting part of playing "house" was being the mommy or daddy, because then you had the power to beat the "kids". My siblings and I came up with a game where you would take turns "spanking" each-other and whoever quit or cried first lost.

It's sickening that this was how we reacted. 

The feeling of power was so rare to us kids that we had to become the only source of power we knew to feel in control of our lives.

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Afraid of the dark

 A year ago, I wrote a post about how as a kid I was convinced that I was possessed by the devil. I talked about the very first moment that I became afraid.

One of my earliest memories is of playing hide-and-seek at Grandma and Grandpa’s trailer. I was lying in the dark under the bed with my face pressed down into the red shag carpet. Waiting. There were dusty shoe boxes and plastic-wrapped blankets stacked all around me. I felt like they were waiting too, for the sunlight, for someone to open them again. Like most children, I was patient only when it came to hiding games, and I was willing to lie there all night, if need be, for someone to find me. I put my hands over my eyes and pushed down on my eye balls. When I lifted the pressure, the space in front of me exploded with imaginary fireworks. I pressed down harder, and harder, until suddenly I thought that maybe I could see a set of eyes. They were big and round and silver and stared right back at me unblinking, like an owl. Completely forgetting the game, I wriggled out from under the bed and went charging down the hall into the kitchen.

“Gramma! When I hide under the bed, I can see an owl’s eyes looking at me!”

Grandma looked up from the dishes with concern on her face. Grandpa, who was sitting at the kitchen table while Grandma cleaned, ordered me to come and stand before him.

 “What did you see?”

“Owl Eyes!” I laughed. “Big round silver ones! Under the bed when I close my eyes!”

I don’t remember what he said next, but I remember my excitement went suddenly cold. Grandpa was not happy. He asked me lots of questions, and before long, Grandma dried off her hands and came to sit with us at the table. They laid their hands on my head and prayed. Grandpa rebuked Satan in the name of Jesus and Grandma whispered “yes Lord” under her breath again and again.

I used to look back on that day as the moment when Satan entered my body.

 

I am sometimes afraid that if I ever become a parent I wont know how to address situations like this. When someone talks about seeing things in the dark, my automatic thought is that it MUST be demons. (Which is ridiculous since I don’t believe in demons.)  But I get uncomfortable and nervous none the less. I was wondering what I would do if my hypothetical child came to me about seeing things in the dark. As I browsed the comments, I came across one from Shadowspring that brought a huge smile to my face.

“Horrifying. You poor princess. I just want to pick up that little girl that saw owl eyes and go rewrite that whole story.

Would I be smart enough to figure out exactly what you had experienced? Probably not, but we could've put treats out for the owl, gone to library for owl books (including Winnie the Pooh), made up a series of owl adventures and/or even had a field trip to the raptor center. That's the kind of grandma I want to be.

I bet your grandparents would cry if they knew that religious freak-out was the beginning of so much pain for you. At least, I hope they would.

Hugs, SS”

 

 As an agnostic, I no longer believe in dark, powerful demons that can harm and hurt you at will. I have no reason to be afraid for myself or my hypothetical children. Thanks, SS for the sweet comment. I know someday I'll think of you when my children come to me afraid of the dark. I know i will honestly be able to say "there is nothing to fear."

Anti-Birth Control or Anti-Women?

During my engagement, my fiancé and I received a call from another young couple we knew. They had been married for about 5 years and already had 4 small children. I had mentioned in a previous conversation that I was considering some kind of IUD to prevent pregnancy for our first year of marriage, so I was not surprised when they revealed that they wanted to talk to us about birth control. “Any birth control besides a barrier method is basically an abortion” they told us. “We will come visit you tonight (it was a 15 hour drive) if you’re really serious about using BC, we feel that strongly about it.”

I took their passionate response as a sign from God: birth control is murder. They gave me the same argument I grew up hearing, but in more detail. If you haven’t heard the argument, it goes something like this: Birth control pills work by thinning the lining of the uterus. If your birth control fails to prevent ovulation (this happens in 2-10% of cases) and an egg becomes fertilized, the uterus will reject the egg, thus causing the “baby” to die and be expelled from the body. The argument continues by saying that millions of babies are murdered by birth control every year.

Some of you may have seen this video circulating on the Internet. It’s the one that claims birth control is responsible for adultery, homosexuality, divorce, murder, and a slew of other “evils.” I won’t even begin to address the dozens of lies and misleading statistics in the video. I just want to address the issue at the core of the anti-birth control. Namely, that birth control is murder.

  

Now, this whole position is ridiculous if you don’t believe that a zygote is a baby. Most people hear the anti-birth control argument and shrug it off. There are some, however, that believe life begins at conception. For those people, hormonal birth control seems to be completely out of the question. However, the anti-birth control crowd leaves out one very important fact: a woman’s body naturally rejects at least 18% of fertilized eggs. This means that if you have unprotected sex that leads to the fertilization of an egg (30% chance or successful fertilization), the resulting zygote has an 18% chance of being rejected by the uterus. The human body naturally performs “abortions” almost 20% of the time. So does taking birth control actually increase the chances of zygote abortion, or does birth control actually reduce the chances of this occurring? Let’s do the math.

Without Birth Control:

Out of 100 fertile women on birth control, 100 of them will ovulate in any given month.

Out of those 100 released eggs, 33 will become fertilized.

Out of those 33, 18% will be rejected by the uterus.

In a group of 100 women not on birth control: 6 zygotes will “die”

With Birth Control:

Out of 100 fertile women on birth control, around 6 of them will ovulate in any given month.

Out of those 6 released eggs, only 2 will become fertilized.

Out of those 2, 100% will be rejected by the uterus.

In a group of 100 women on birth control: 2 zygotes will “die”

So let’s get this straight, taking birth control makes a woman’s body LESS likely to dispel fertilized eggs. If you believe that life begins at conception, shouldn’t it be your moral duty to reduce the number of zygote “abortions?” If you believe that a zygote is a human, you actually kill more babies by refusing to take birth control.

How has such a massive flaw gone unnoticed all this time? Did anti-birth control advocates really just “miss” these obvious facts, or could it be that they like the result of this misconception? Denying women rights to their own reproduction is the oldest weapon in the war on women. Even if you believe that a zygote deserves the same rights as a full grown human, there is still no reason to oppose birth control other than to control women.

 I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of the “personhood” smokescreen. Let’s call the anti-birth control message by its real name: anti-woman.

Value?

Leaning against the door of my bathroom stall, I closed my eyes tight and counted to 60, 3 times. The box said to wait three minutes for the best results. We’d only been married 2 weeks, and here I was in McDonald’s bathroom in Wisconsin taking a pregnancy test.

 A baby right now would ruin everything;

                   all our plans,

 all our possibilities.

                                                             But somehow I was still desperately hopeful.

When I opened my eyes and saw that tiny pink minus sign, I was shocked at the misery that swept over me.

 “I don’t want a baby” I whispered to myself. “I don’t WANT to be pregnant.”

 I quickly wiped away my tears and went outside to my anxious husband. “Crisis averted!” I joked, but I avoided eye contact. I didn’t want him to see the emptiness in my eyes.

That was the first of many negative pregnancy tests. Every time I bought a box at Walgreens I secretly hoped that THIS would be the time. THIS would be the test that would come back positive. And every time I would throw the negative stick in the garbage and cry on the inside if not for real. I didn’t understand why it made me feel so awful. Until recently, I was sure it was my god-given desire to nurture that made me hate myself for being childless.

In a sense, that is true. But it’s not a god-given desire: it’s just my P/QF programming.  

This is not a post about how Quiverfull taught me to want babies.

 This is not even about how Patriarchy taught me that I didn’t deserve to dream big and reach my goals.

                                                      This is about something deeper.

                                                             This is about identity

                                                                     and value.

Most Christian-raised kids are told that they have no inherent value. I was told to find my identity and value in God alone. I internalized that to mean that God was the only thing that made me worth loving. Without him I was I worthless, useless piece of garbage. As a kid I constantly reminded myself how worthless I was. It didn’t take long for that to sink in. I tried and tried to be close to god, but he was always so far away. I knew he didn’t care about me. And I knew it was because of how worthless I was.

Ashamed, I started looking elsewhere for something to bring value to my useless shell.

“I am valuable because I do my chores faster than anyone else”

“I am lovable because I sing in front of the church”

“I am worthy because I punish myself with a razor blade”

“I am respectable because I exercise 25 hours a week”

I have transferred my sense value from one thing to the next for my entire life. When I got married, it was like all of that was suddenly cut out from under me.

Everything in my life was

                   brand new,

       but I was still the same,

                  and now I had nothing left to bring value to my existence.

I have come to realize what was really going on in my heart every time I took a pregnancy test. I was hoping against hope that a tiny pink plus sign would show up in that window and give me a reason to keep on living.

Every day I am learning to love myself for the first time in my life. I am learning to find value in myself. I am slowly discovering that I have an identity apart from god,

                                              or parents,

                                                         or skills,

                                                              or accomplishments.

                                                                              I am valuable because I am human.

 And so are you.

 I don’t want a baby right now. But someday when I have one, I promise you I will tell them everyday how worthy they are. How precious they are. How VALUABLE they are.

 It seems like a simple lesson, but let me tell you: the older you get, the harder that lesson is to learn.