#2 Our Deepest Wound is Our Healing Work in the World- Women Talking

Trigger warning—this story, my story is about rape. Please take care of yourself.

I went twice to see the movie, Women Talking: Do Nothing. Stay and Fight. Leave.

I watched it once with my Rogue Sister and once by myself. The first viewing felt like a wave washing over me. I couldn’t ground into the dialogue, which is the heart of the movie. The conversations held by women in a dire situation were profound, complex. Women who have to make what is probably the most important decision of their lives, a choice that also ripples out to the safety and wellbeing of their children.

Just like in our real lives everything turns on our decisions. And we often act under an opaque lens of misogyny, patriarchy and hierarchy. (see my first post here)

I had read the true story of Women Talking, which is about a Mennonite Community in Bolivia where some of the men in their community used cow tranquilizer spray to incapacitate families at night. Then they crept into the house to brutally rape the women and children. The women woke bloodied, bruised and confused. The elders of the community said it was “female imagination” or satanic attacks. It went on for 5 years until they were caught in 2010.

The ‘Real’ story burdened me during my first viewing of the movie, because reality was harsher. The women stayed. The women did nothing. There’s talk that the rapes still happen today. The second time I watched the movie alone, I was able to fully immerse into the deep and poignant conversations. Emotions flowed through me and I exited the theater feeling hopeful.

We can change things.

We do have conscious power.

We can act.

We do have a voice.

All those decades of my desire to share my story came to a point of action. Thus these posts.

My Voice is necessary.

However; please note, I am not judging the real Mennonite women for not leaving. That is the wrong focus. The most important focus in this movie, in my life, in the lives of women and children is:

WHY DO MEN RAPE?

HOW DO WE TEACH OUR BOYS TO BE FEMINISTS? (by Feminist, I mean “For Women”, no misogyny, no patriarchy, no hierarchy)

The first time my mother told me I was conceived by date rape, I was 23 years old and already struggling in my two year marriage. It didn’t feel shocking. It felt like the last puzzle piece had slipped into place creating the complete image of my parent’s marriage. Yes, my mother married the man who raped her. There was no support to do otherwise by her parents.

“You will not bring an illegitimate child into my home!” her father bellowed. (Patriarchy/Misogyny)

“You’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it” her mother explained. (Internalized Patriarchy/Misogyny)

This was 1960. Abortion was not yet legal. And at this writing, it’s a convoluted mess of state laws throughout the land as the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade in 2022.

But wait, you think…if your mother had aborted you, you would not be here to write this. Yes, that is true AND it’s about controlling women…For another post.

My mother ran away for a time. She stayed with an aunt and uncle. Then went to a home for unwed mothers, but felt she couldn’t give me up for adoption. She prayed I’d be a girl. Why? I wonder, when girls like her had so little autonomy. Finally, her family found her wandering the railroad tracks in the middle of the night, desperate and suicidal. They took her home. One July day, she and my father married.

After my mother told me her story, I went to lunch with my father.

“Is this true?” I asked. “Yes”, he chuckled. “Today it would be called date rape. You have to understand, I had such a strong sex drive.”

As I think back to that moment, I know my body was numb. I did not yet know the full impact of his actions on me and the years of my parents volatile-explosive relationship on my soul, my psyche, my self worth. The gradual unveiling began. Isn’t all of life a gradual unveiling as we open to consciousness?

In a flat voice, I replied, “Dad, my husband has a strong sex drive and he has never raped me.”

My rape conception had a huge inner impact on my psyche. My very first memory was steeped in the feeling of how ‘bad’ I was. Underneath that was an existential sense that I did not have the right to exist. Of course, this cannot be articulated at 4 years old. But I remember the feeling as I crouched under a blanket with my brother and friend, Bobby. We sat on the cold cement floor under the stairwell of our apartment complex. Bobby had a book of matches. Our faces lit up as he struck each match and we watched it burn, sulfur filling our nostrils. My mother found us. Yanking the blanket off yelling, “What are you doing?!”

I knew to my bones I was ‘bad’. This feeling of being ‘bad’ and not having the right to exist was a consistent programming in my very cells.

In yogic philosophy, the Right to Exist is the Root Chakra, our beginning foundation. A chakra is like an energetic center in our body. The most common yogic philosophy says we have 7 chakras. This was key to my healing. I cannot begin to tell you how much the sensation of feeling my feet on the ground, or my butt in a chair or my back body on the ground helped to heal me. It is profound. Having an embodied experience of being held by the Earth by gravity began to alter that programing in my cells. The bodily sensation of being held is healing. I know I am here. I know I have a right to be here. I exist. Nothing my father or mother did or did not do can change that.

The feeling of being ‘bad’ began to shift as I learned to have compassion for myself. As I began to see my humanity with all of it’s gifts and shadows, when I began to actively get to know mySelf, all my child parts and cherish them, my self worth began to heal too.

There is much more subtlety to share here, but that’s for another time.

The point is my father and the men in that Mennonite Community felt entitled to a woman/women/children and their bodies. They only exist to serve men. There is no sense of the sacredness, nor humanity of the women and children. Rapists simply dominate. Rapists simply take. In the full story of how my parents met, there was an ownership mentality from the very beginning. When my father saw my mother, he announced to all the other frat boys there,“She is mine!”

Internalized patriarchy and misogyny trained my mother not to stand in her value or worth as a sacred human being. She had been taught since birth that men are above women. (Heirarchy/Patriarchy) This was modeled in the church she grew up in and by her parents. For my father, she was simply an ornament, a body for the taking, for penetration. To her parents, she was to be an obedient, good Christian girl. She must please them to please God.

In The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing In A Toxic Culture, by Dr. Gabor Mate’, he writes in chapter 23 titled, ‘Society’s Shock Absorbers: Why Women Have It Worse’:

“The sexualization of women is another source of ill health. Being for the use another can make of you is an assault on the self. Girls and women are much more likely to be subjected to it, even sold the seductive idea that there is empowerment in it.”

“Meanwhile, [patriarchy-misogyny] teaches many boys to associate pleasure with domination and a shutdown of tender feelings. The suppression of vulnerable emotions, of course, is one manifestation of male trauma, leading inexorably to a withering of compassion for others—-especially when those others have something we want, as in every instance of date rape or nonconsensual sexual aggression.”

I know a kind man, who as a boy remembers his grandfather joke whenever he saw a pregnant woman, “I wonder what got into her?”

This same grandfather had fun “goosing” his two grandsons, which meant he’d stick his thumb up their butts as they walked by making a goose sound. Both of these actions are toxic. This kind man loves his grandfather and does not see the harm in what he did.

My father lacks empathy. I have even said as much to his face. He answers in the positive.

“Yes, I know I do. I’ve been that way as long as I can remember. I don’t know why.”

I wonder what happened to my father as a young boy.

Patriarchy & Misogyny have been around for a long time, slowly by slowly we can change things.

My Voice is Necessary.