Poetic License

It’s late in the afternoon on a Friday, and I’m just biding my time for the end of my work day. Sunday is my birthday. Next week I’m on vacation, which ends with Memorial Day. Any time now, the bee man, aka the exterminator, is coming. Don’t hate me, but I have to get rid of these carpenter bees that have set up shop in my deck. I’ve lived with them for three summers now, and they just keep getting more numerous and more aggressive. Yes, I know they don’t sting, but there is something unsettling about being buzzed and strafed constantly while I try to sit on my deck with friends. The bee man is going to spray some pesticide dust into the crevasses and holes in my deck. Hopefully this deck will last me another few summers before I have to replace it entirely, because over the years since it was installed, it has seen moisture and neglect and use and bees–lots of bees.

I’m not the kind of person who takes a lot of vacations. (These days my “vacations” are generally used up a day at a time for medical appointments, which is the worst way you can spend PTO.) When I was growing up, my family and I would go on trips back “home” in the summer to see our relatives, to the “big” towns of Irwinville, Ocilla, and Fitzgerald, Georgia. (Yes, I jest.) Not exactly vacations, in the sense of the word we generally understand.

One time, Dad granted me my wish for a beach vacation for my birthday–a trip that was supposed to be to Lake Charles, Louisiana, but ended up being to Biloxi, Mississippi. For some reason, Dad just decided Lake Charles wouldn’t do, so he kept on driving. At that point, I was pretty sure my dad, running on autopilot, was going to travel all the way to Georgia, forgetting about my birthday. But we stopped and went to a few places along the beach in Biloxi. My mother told me stories of how different the coastline had been before Hurricane Camille hit in 1969. I was a little young to remember details when that hurricane came through, but I do remember my mother’s shock as we drove through the summer after. There was devastation.

I don’t remember what else we did in Biloxi during my birthday trip, but we certainly didn’t go into the ocean. I’m not sure I got to go out on the beach at all. Dad was a strange man, rigid and fearful of everything and everyone (which came out as aggression) and certainly would not have allowed the lot of us to go parading around in swimsuits in public. We might have gone to the hotel pool. We only spent a single night away from home. My fascination with the beach never waned, though.

Not long after high school, I moved to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, with Paul and his father and brother. We lived, at first, in our cars by the Kitty Hawk pier, and then we found a house on stilts two blocks from the beach that we could rent until the following summer. Off-season rental. Being right there at the ocean was life-altering. Though I had been to Galveston a couple of times in high school, after I left my parents’ home, I had never seen anything other than Galveston Bay and the ship channel in Houston, or the Gulf of Mexico along the coast of the southern United States. The Atlantic was something new altogether. It was deep and churning; it was endless. The sand was covered at night by tiny ghost crabs that skittered away from the lights on the pier or cautiously crept up to our toes and tested their tiny pincers on them. We walked miles and miles along that beach, sat in the restaurant on the pier drinking coffee and eating eggs and toast at sunrise, or simply sat on one of the benches set into the pier and felt each wave as it hit when the tide was coming in. It was scary and wonderful to be rocked by all that power.

At that time in my life, I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be. The world was at my feet, but the fear was in my heart. Some of my father’s anxiety was in me. Some of my mother’s depression stole joy from many of my days. Having the freedom that comes after graduation with no real prospects for college scared me a little. What was next for me? Before my first pregnancy, and the loss of the baby, I had strongly considered going into the Navy. Paul took delayed entry into the Marines. When I had found out I was pregnant, I had stepped back. Now I was without a child, without a significant job, and Paul would soon go away to boot camp. We listened to Robert Plant on a portable boom box that should probably not have been at the beach in all that salt air. We held hands and talked about the future. The future we envisioned went as far as him graduating boot camp and then bringing me to wherever he got stationed. We both knew I wanted more, even if I didn’t know exactly what. Having a baby so soon had never been our plan, and as much as it hurt us to lose her, we knew we were better off because we couldn’t have supported her adequately.

How might life have been different if we had had money and all of the security it could buy? Though we would have had the ability to go to college and to put a roof over our heads, I still would have been carrying around all the neuroses of my parents. It would still have taken time for me to sort through it all. Having all the neuroses and none of the life skills or creature comforts, however, made me feel as though I were standing on a one-inch cliff over a rocky coastline, seconds from falling into oblivion. Being a woman in the early 1980s was freeing and frightening. Unlike my mother, I could (and did) have a bank account. Once I landed a job in North Carolina, I would be able to get a credit card, should I want one, and a mortgage and birth control and anything else I wanted. I no longer needed a husband’s permission for any of it. The world was changing rapidly. Mom had not had such freedom, and it cost her dearly. She nearly died while having my little sister. It was only then that my father consented to letting her have birth control pills. Six children in. And as scary as life was when I started my adulthood, it was rich with choice.

When my parents divorced, Mom had to learn how to balance a checkbook (once she got an account). She had to go to work in the “panty factory” in Fitzgerald, working like a slave, all the while dealing with illness and a horrible slide into menopause that resulted in a hysterectomy. All I can remember thinking is that I didn’t want to be like my mother, ever, and as it turns out, I’m not. But if the world hadn’t shifted in the 1970s, I would have had little choice. My financial and physical health would have been dictated by a husband, or by my father, if I became a “spinster.” I would have been paid about sixty percent of what male counterparts were paid, because they had to support families. I would have likely been desperately poor.

Mom told me that she had wanted to be a nurse, but Dad wouldn’t even think of letting her go to nursing school or working outside the home. It was her duty to be his wife, to bear children, to keep house, to deal with his alcoholism, and to be hit when he felt like hitting.

This brings me to my next point. When someone like Harrison Butker stands in front of an auditorium full of college graduates and tells them lies, tells them that the happiest day of a woman’s life is when she takes on the “vocation” of wife and mother, tells them that it’s a deadly sin to be proud of who you are (if you’re gay), or calls the COVID-19 pandemic a “failure of leadership” and a “fiasco”, well, I kind of want to punch him in the nose. Women have fought so hard to be recognized and to be seen as anything close to equal in society and in our workplaces. It has been a long climb out of sweatshops or abusive relationships or being the chattel of men.

And LGBTQIA+ folks like me have fought desperately to be able to live in society unencumbered by ridiculous notions of Puritanism. We used to be arrested, just for trying to socialize with each other. We were underground. I won’t go back into the closet. It doesn’t matter if I ever have another relationship. I am who I am, and you don’t get to dictate my morals or norms, little kicker man. Personally, I hope you are booed each time you go out on the field this season. You are being listed as “Do Not Draft” in my fantasy league. Your words were so insulting and hurtful, and it’s not enough for the NFL to just state that your views are not those of the league. I’m all for free speech, but you have a public platform and therefore have social responsibility.

It must be lovely for your wife to be able to choose to be a “homemaker” versus having a career outside the home. It is a choice. It must be nice that you have all that money from your sports career to give her that choice in life. Most of us haven’t had the option, and your words show that you simply can’t see outside your tiny bubble to embrace all the single mothers, women who had to take on careers out of necessity, or women who chose to have a purpose in life outside tending to a man. What becomes of a woman who finds herself abused and needing to find a way to support herself (and children)? What happens when a woman finds herself in the middle of a divorce? What happens if a woman is gay or doesn’t want to be married for any other reason? Obviously, that doesn’t fit into your narrow worldview. You think there is one way to be in life. You think all men and women should take on the “vocation” of marriage, homemaking, and the 1950s way of life. I guess never mind that your mother, Elizabeth, is an award-winning radiation oncologist at Emory University. Never mind that her hard work has helped and inspired so many. I have to wonder–is it her you’re really fighting and maligning?

You further insulted the Church by saying the priests should have ignored COVID protocols and taken the sacrament to the sick and dying. You’re ignoring the fact that they would not have been allowed to do so. Yes, we’ve had war and pestilence throughout history, but we know a lot more about germs and infection now. And while you were insulting the Church, I noticed you never scolded them for hiding sexual abuse for years and for protecting the priests who did it. Because you only think of yourself and your family. I shudder to think what will happen if one of your children ever comes to you with a story of sex abuse, or if they come out to you as gay. You are exactly the type of man who would disown them. I actually pity you and your very large blinders about the world. I pity your wife, and I pity your children. I will do nothing to ever support your career.

Since I started writing this post, the bee man has come and gone, and I feel bad. I feel I shouldn’t have done it. My deck is littered by little dead bodies falling from the holes in the rafters. If only they hadn’t been drilling through the structure of my deck, I would have let them be. I don’t feel as bad for the ants he sprayed, because they have been a horrible problem. They were so industrious, they were climbing the crepe myrtle beside my deck, crossing the awning, and going into the roof vents. He sprayed as much as he could see and advised me to cut back the bush. My son will bring his chainsaw over this weekend to help. If the ants get worse, I might have to call the bee man again. I can’t abide ants or roaches. Or whatever that multi-legged, two-inch long bug was that was in my sink this morning.

Or kickers who try to make me feel bad about who I am.

Have a good weekend, folks. Pride month is coming, and I’m here to celebrate it.

Namaste, Jude