I once pushed three living human babies from this body. Doing so is outrageous, dangerous and really, quite seemingly, both impossible and ridiculous. It’s a grunting, sweating, death’s-head-grimacing surprise. That pain. Like a large brick object, with long, impossible fingernails seeking purchase in the muck of mucous and blood that also leaks from me without consent. Wise in the primordial ways of peristalsis, the unborn grinds, inexorably, along a narrow, but infinitely expanding passage-to-air-from-water-disney-ride that is a vagina.
Amazing things, vaginas.
To think I once thought this orifice was a tidbit, attached as an afterthought to a clitoris and other fleshly exuberances, thought of, in the beginning of time, by some benevolent mystical femme deity, for the sole purpose of self-gratification.
AFTERBIRTH
I suckled these people who had been expelled from this flesh and blood body. Examined their poo, before cleaning it from their skin with scientific precision. I experienced an absurd pleasure—a sense of being righteous—as each of them burped without vomiting on me. I never slept. I have known love.
Next, the terror. Two, three months into their tiny lives. Me waking to daylight. Why have they not screamed for me to do their bidding two hours before sunrise, as usual? How did I sleep through what is sure to be a living nightmare? By all that’s worthy of praise, have I slumbered through their death? I race to their room to find them smearing the wall, artfully, intentionally and creatively. Intently and silently. With their own excrement.
Losing them to school. Do I know the cage into which I have thrust them? Uniformed, peer-pressured, comparing and comparative? In the hope they will achieve seeming-success under a captor’s terms-and-conditions-layer of well thought out concrete that will pull them to the bottom of the bay as surely as the Titanic on an arctic night? Destined for conformity and questionlessness? Into an idealized but bullshit existence, selling insurance, becoming a doctor or a lawyer (forgive me, mother mary, I didn’t know how glaring delusions actually can be until I reached, oh, forty five). The right to a mortgage and an upgraded car. And a cat. And an opinion accompanied by a you’re SUCH a control freak comeback by your teenager. And botox. And redundancy. Oh, and a corona virus or some such, later: an interesting pathogen that mutates and causes the bubonic plague to seem edible.
To push them away. To hold them too close. To teach them to be safe. This is parenthood. This is incalculable anxt. No, it’s okay. I kept them safe. They’re alive—and adults now. Aren’t they? Didn’t I?
TO BE SAFE
What a liar. How have I taught safety?
I did not take them to Ethiopia during the famine and made sure they helped carry the babies to the UNHCR tents. I did not drag them to Utopia to have them comprehend what growing up without garbage collection is like, now the people there have been taught (by the same system that has schooled these children) to be unlearned: of the wisdom of hunting, and seasons, and playing in a river. I have not grabbed them, now, and caught a flight to Lebanon to help erect shelter after the brutality of the blast. And, no matter how I cajoled, I did not keep them away from sugar. I talked. The thing we do when we can’t do anything else.
CHILD KILLER
This is not self-abnegation—I have long ago sliced the smug and condescending smile from guilt’s perennial face. It is realization. I did not teach them. Nothing. I have thought long and hard about this. I caved, is what I did. I thought of them as ‘mine’ when that is clearly a shocking arrogance. I did keep them from predators, though, didn’t I? No, I did not. I let them drink coca cola. I allowed them birthday cakes. I didn’t wonder at the additives or the artificial coloring. At the madness of balloons in the intestines of pelicans. I doomed them to indoctrination.
To reliance.
Even though all three of them—today—are living bodies, what of lore?
VIOLENCE
I am talking about the presumption of many that it’s okay to be cruel. That to have a dwelling in which to stay dry, a body has to go into debt to complete strangers. In the current era, to be successful, it’s necessary to drink alcohol to be thought sophisticated, even though it’s a toxin. To wear four inch stilettos and get a conceptually-long labia sliced to an appropriately fashionable size, to sift through several thousand images of ourselves to find the one that sends the message: feisty but available, on the tinder app.
I am also talking about the presumption that World War 3 will not decimate Melbourne, or Sydney, or London, or Beirut tonight, while we sleep. The forgetfulness of all the women from Boudega to Emily Wilding Davidson, Wounded Knee, the Tasmanian Black War, Bergen-Belsen, the Clearances, the Slave Trade, David Dungay Jnr, Bobby Sands, Stonewall and the right to beat one’s children to within an inch of their lives, and to buy one or two if the church has an abundance, from shamed women who should have known better
than to dress for rape, even though they were never told about rape. The abduction, of non-Anglo-European, animist, healthy and ancestrally-taught hunter/gatherer children, institutionalized—safe—behind razor-wired protection facilities. The burning-for-profit of primordial Forests and bugger all the animal-people who live there. It’s lumber, that’s the word I was looking for. Not trees, no, that hints at sentience and we can’t have vivisection if we agree to sentience. The disposable face masks and disease-laden, unincinerated latex gloves, the feeding frenzy of a corporate cocaine snack, food freedom destined to induce obesity and type 2 diabetes before the age of twelve, and the ideology of religion, blatant or obtuse, dooming offspring to a life of privilege or paucity.
Violence is not always a broken face or an amputated limb. Violence is also given kindly: ice cream, pizza, chips, beer, champaign, advice. The forgetfulness of all the women from Boudega to Emily Wilding Davidson, Wounded Knee, the Tasmanian Black War, Bergen-Belsen, the Clearances, the Slave Trade, David Dungay Jnr, Bobby Sands, Stonewall and the right to beat one’s children to within an inch of their lives, and to buy one or two if the church has an abundance, from shamed women who should have known better
than to dress for rape, even though they were never told about rape. The abduction, of non-Anglo-European, animist, healthy and ancestrally-taught hunter/gatherer children, institutionalized—safe—behind razor-wired protection facilities. The burning-for-profit of primordial Forests and bugger all the animal-people who live there. It’s lumber, that’s the word I was looking for. Not trees, no, that hints at sentience and we can’t have vivisection if we agree to sentience. The disposable face masks and disease-laden, unincinerated latex gloves, the feeding frenzy of a corporate cocaine snack, food freedom destined to induce obesity and type 2 diabetes before the age of twelve, and the ideology of religion, blatant or obtuse, dooming offspring to a life of privilege or paucity.
MIRROR, MIRROR
This is not about what we can’t change. Like the plastic in your house, your office, your car. The glare of primary colors, neon, ruined music, and the hallucinatory, unspeakably mindless volume of non-essential products in a supermarket or online, a person’s capacity to believe in advertising balderdash, and to trash Manila for the cost of an upgraded iphone.
No, this is about fear.
I never taught the children whom I birthed what to fear. I never knew they needed to know that.
FEAR
Have you watched a mouse being chased by a cat? They are remarkable! And most of the time they get away. Why? Because they are afraid. They don’t want to be eaten. Deep in Mouse-person’s ancestral brain is the DNA-memory of being consumed
whilst still alive, awake and capable of knowing that their left leg is now missing. What’s astonishing, is that even while being in the same situation—for THE FIRST TIME—mouse-person knows the way this could go. So, they run. An understatement, don’t you agree? They DON’T JUST RUN. They weave and dart, use shadow like Johanne Sebastian Bach composing the Brandenburg concerto… good goblins-and-garden-gnomes, they fucking-well FLY when they leap between the adjacent building’s highest wall and the compost heap far below.
All because their body-memory, womb to womb, vagina to vagina, taught them to be afraid. Is that why human babies cry, with such desperation and denial, when they first breathe air? Because they are afraid? They ARE afraid. And the first thing us larger mammals do is assure them, with a coo and a pat, that everything is alright. They are safe. Look, here’s the nipple, now suck on this.
That’s okay. But there comes a time. I don’t know. Is it at a year old? Three? Seven is way too late. But then, twelve? Having lived into the double digit years, and never being chased by a great white shark whilst paddling at Balmoral beach, doesn’t make a person safe. Having fed them kinder surprise after the tanty in the supermarket is not a protection, nor is it an immunity booster. Swimming lessons are excellent but, knowing what’s underneath them in deep water is not usually part of the curriculum.
In the classic Dune series, Frank Herbert invents the Bene Gesserit (I know, I emoted almost exclusively to them in late teens), one of whom—the Reverend Mother—dares Paul, the future Mau’dib, to place a hand in a box whose contents are unknown. Apparently, he’ll die if he doesn’t, and could quite likely die if he does. He puts his hand in the box. Then comes the bullshit. Probably the only bullshit in the entire series (of which I am still enamored). A litany embraced by other idiots (I believed it once), like the unequivocal need for a hot shower in the morning:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
And what a load of utter puerile nonsense is THAT?
Mouse would never get away from Cat. Woman will continue to be beaten, those people called homeless will continue to be viewed by a suited, and indebted-to-the-hilt population, as somehow lacking, when, in actuality, they are tribal.
Fear hones us. It gives us an edge—enough—to whisper who can help me? And to sometimes—sometimes—get an answer.
Fear is going to happen to you. Has happened. Is happening. If you and I are not provided a level of insight regarding this protection we, or those we love, will be hurt because, trust me, not one inhabitant of the Warsaw ghettos said to themselves or their families, Oh yes, cattle trucks, what a good idea. Grossaktion Warsaw, hmm. Sure. It seems like a good premise to pack, don’t you agree?
NO ONE DOES ANYTHING
Martin Gilbert [1] writes: In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.
No. We are fed the propaganda that the people just went.
And here, in what’s left of Gondwana: Generations of Australians have been taught that no wars have ever been fought on Australian soil. Yet as many as 20,000 black Australians died fighting a war of resistance that lasted for more than a century [2].
Bussamarai,
Calyute
Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda,
Dundalli,
Pemulwuy
When I was a kid at school I was never taught their names. Propaganda says they didn’t mind us coming here, infecting their blankets, giving them grog and taking their children. Oh, let’s build a bronze statue and erect it where our ancestors are now grass. C’mon. It’ll be fun! Like playing Rio Tinto in the caves of the Pilbara!
They were afraid.
And that fear made them strong. Much as the colonialist regimes would have us believe to the contrary, the many First Nation’s offspring are still here.
Fear is not the enemy. Fear is the immediately necessary story, told to Mouse, by their own body. It says: you are under attack!!!! Fear permits us to release massive floods of proactive force into our bloodstream. Fear fuels us to run, to scream, to resist.
Necessary for us to defend. To be brave. It is the event: the terrifying, immanence of violation and destruction that releases this ancient, ancestral juice of visceral, overwhelming brilliance and audacity—the response to threat—that we must work at paying attention to. That we must teach our children to recognize. To know how to not freeze (the third, and most unsatisfactory, of the f words here: fight, flee, freeze).
WHY WE TRAIN
I’ve been quiet as to why, over the many decades, I have learned several martial arts. Why I have done this physicality. Hapkido, aikido, MMA, iaido. Free weights, until I have shoulders that look like small, striated melons allowing me to be capable of lifting the front end of a bubble car from where it was seemingly, irrevocably bogged. I don’t have to provide a reason, do I? Was there one? Absolutely. Did I save the kids I raised from harm? Just. Did violence occur more than once? In so many ways that I refuse to talk about it.
I trained hard. Because I knew fear. Then, as I grew older and became “unfuckable” I almost thought about stopping. But no. Because some instinct didn’t want me balancing dissolving bones in a steel walking frame at aged 60. Because I’d thought I was safe enough to be lazy; wizened enough to get away with eating jelly? Perhaps.
Then came the phone call. A couple of nights ago. From a friend, decades younger than me and in actual danger, albeit not from someone in her house, but from a predator who was coming for her. She, too, had pushed a human being from her vagina. The experience of that is one thing, the threat implied from a man who considers himself privileged—who WANTS her, despite her—has her caged and in hiding. Terrified. Not knowing what to do if he comes to her door, no matter how clever she’s been at avoiding him. So far.
And here it is. I show her. Old woman things. Bokken. Bow. How to throw a punch. How to cripple a leg. How to grab him in a clutch and drive a knee over and over and over, into his kidneys. To know how strong she truly is.
How unexpectedly accurate a strike with a jo staff can be; how absolute the concussion. To know the ramifications of self-defense under the law (not too jolly). What to expect if she actually kills him. If that is the only option because the cops place an apprehended violence order (AVO) on him and he comes around the following night, in the silence of 4 a.m. and sets fire to her house.
To be so utterly confident that she might—just might—react with the ferocity of that mouse, if the situation becomes necessary.
TEACH THE FUTURE
Teach your kids what fear feels like. Let them understand that their bodies produce the antidote to predation. Don’t sit them down and suggest—after a small, uncontrollably vicious dog has bitten their arm and made it bleed—that they relax and breathe deeply. Get them to say to a pillow I do not mean you harm, but we must kill the monster together. And you need, now, like me, to learn to be as ready to live as the wiliest-ever mouse that EVER was, and then have said child beat the pillow on the bed, over and over and over, until they are lathered in sweat, have cried and cried at how far their trust of dogs has retreated from their capacity for trust… until they are done. Until the cortisol has left their bloodstream and they can heal.
An animal’s (human or otherwise) stress-response system is usually self-limiting. Once a perceived threat has passed, hormones return to normal. As adrenaline and cortisol levels drop, heart rate and blood pressure return to baseline normalcy, and other systems resume their relentless living activities. But when stressors are always present and a person feels constantly under attack, hyper-vigilance is the result. We stays turned on. The long-term activation of stress-response, and the overexposure to adrenalin, cortisol and other danger-induced hormones can disrupt almost all our animal-body processes. This puts us at increased risk of many health problems, including:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Digestive problems
- Headaches
- Heart disease
- Sleep problems
- Weight gain
- Memory and concentration impairment
That’s why it’s so important to learn healthy ways to navigate life’s stressors.[3] Soft, gentle words can come later. Any time. All the time. That’s also just wonderful. But not at the expense of our children’s lives, their sanity, their self-worth or their relationships, when you are no longer able to provide them with the truth of the world. Or worse. If you knew the truth of the world and you have told them they were safe, despite it. Told them that you will always keep them safe, when that is a lie.
You can’t. You won’t. You didn’t. You wish somebody had had this conversation with you. You need your own crash pillow that has agreed with the process. You need to teach the child—and know it for yourself—that mice are ferocious when the need arises, and there is the possibility of escape. You need to open the cage door.
Fear is not the enemy. An enemy is the enemy. Fear can save your life.
[1] The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Sir Martin Gilbert, 2021
[2] Six Australian Battlefields, Marji Hill & Al Grasby, 1998
[3]https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037#:~:text=Cortisol%2C%20the%20primary%20stress%20hormone,fight%2Dor%2Dflight%20situation