Mamaw My Ass

I never promised you a rose garden

A couple of months ago I was watching Hunting Wives, a show I enjoyed like a hot fudge sundae. If you want to survive the slow and painful erosion of democracy you have to watch some good trash occasionally - this is a tried and true coping mechanism and saves you from losing your mind.

At the very end of an episode as the credits were rolling, a song came on. The song was, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” A few notes in, a memory started wending and pushing and elbowing its way forward from the deep recesses of wherever my childhood memories live, particularly the ones I haven’t remembered in over forty years.

Wasn’t there a film by that name, and hadn’t I seen it? Images started resurfacing - images of a wildly unhappy young girl trying to hurt herself in the most profound way. If I was recalling correctly, she ended up in an institution - but what I remembered most was how scared and confused I’d been watching the film as a child. A child? I grabbed my phone and Googled it - the film came out in 1977, I was six. Imagine One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but without the laughs.

My Dad and stepmom used to take me to see movies all the time. They liked independent, artsy films, the kind I like today. I think they believed, as my mother did, that anything too difficult to comprehend would “go over my head.” This seems to have been a parenting tenet of the 1970s. Joke’s on me, them, and probably all of Gen X because that stuff went directly into my head, and into all of our heads. Ask any Gen Xer you know when they read Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind and If There Be Thorns. Then ask for a synopsis if you’re unfamiliar, because it is not normal that we all read this series before we were fourteen.

Anyway, there I was just trying to escape the horrors and enjoy a little good hot fun with the Hunting Wives, when this song floated through the airwaves to my stereocilia - the little hairs inside the ear in case you don’t remember from 8th grade science class - and continued along to my cerebral cortex where long term memory gets stored.

I beg your pardon. Photo by Danica Stradecke on Unsplash

There are different kinds of long term memories - the emotional kind, like this unsettling movie memory, the procedural kind, like how to tie your shoes, or the declarative kind - which you use when you do things like balance your checkbook.

The thinking on memory has changed over time, but however it works, there’s no way a six-year-old should watch “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”, nor should an eleven-year-old see the movie, “Brainwaves” - a film I saw with my mother. In it, the main character is roused from a coma by having a brain transplanted from another woman who recently died.

It’s great, she’s awake! Until she starts having memories from the dead woman’s last day, and it turns out she was murdered by an intruder who caught her bathing, and kept saying he wouldn’t touch her. The audience is seeing these scenes unfurl as well, so I can tell you that’s what the intruder said over and over again, “I’m not going to touch you, don’t worry.” Then he dropped her hair dryer in the tub - or maybe it was a toaster.

I can’t remember that detail because I probably blocked it out or closed my eyes - but her hair dryer makes more sense since it happened in a bathroom. I don’t know why I think he grabbed her toaster when he passed through the kitchen, but for some reason I think he might have. I am not going to re-watch this movie, so we’ll never know unless you watch it and report back.

He didn’t touch her, but she fucking died anyway. Shockingly, that did not go over my head. To this day, I am paranoid about outlets in the bathroom. We should be able to Ctrl+Alt+Delete some memories.

Years ago, I saw a documentary about Imago therapy and it made so much sense to me. Imago therapy works with the idea that a relationship does not happen inside one person or the other, it happens in the space between them. The relationship is a third thing - a co-creation. Each person gets to decide what they’re putting into that space, whether they’re treating the third thing with reverence and respect, or not.

Maybe they decide to show up with their patience, compassion, love, attention, and willingness to make the relationship a priority - or they could put their resentment, ever-growing list of ways they’ve been wronged, frustration, recklessness or unwillingness to have hard conversations in the mix instead.

When you’re talking about a family, there may be multiple people in the space, and all kinds of dynamics between the people orbiting one another. That’s where children learn and grow and listen - and try to make sense of the world. It’s their first sun and moon, their first constellation, the place where they discover cause-and-effect and gravity - where they feel safe, or like they’re flying through space with nothing much to hold onto.

Most parents teach their children to be kind, to think about how other people feel, to share, to keep their word, to not say anything if they don’t have anything nice to say. That was a phrase of my mother’s, but then she’d say things to me sometimes that were so mean they’d leave me speechless and feeling like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. Or we’d pass someone on the street and she’d criticize their outfit in a way that would make me feel terrible for them, and embarrassed that she could be so cruel - even if I was the only one who’d heard.

There’s no doubt we’re all influenced by our families of origin, the place where we grew up and the things we were exposed to - for some amount of time. That’s the soil, it’s where our roots formed and our tree grew, but we aren’t trees. We aren’t apples, either. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” might be a compliment in some cases, but if it isn’t, no one is actually an apple. We get to decide who we’re going to be, and since we’re not apples, we can stand up and make choices and figure things out.

It is such a mind-bending time to be alive, and also exhausting. There are things that seem so obvious to me, and yet I see people behaving in ways that make it clear we are looking at the same things and coming away with vastly different takes. Some of it is social media, the algorithms and the echo chambers, but that isn’t all of it - I wish it were that simple.

I wish the ways in which I have diverged from a close friend could be explained by algorithms, that he was just seeing a different version of reality than I am - but it’s deeper than that, and more complicated - or less, depending on how you look at it. It’s not just that he’s seeing content curated for him based on his likes, and the same is happening for me. It’s that people are actually, literally suffering, and I don’t think there’s a way to not know that unless you’re working hard to not know that. It’s a choice.

I try not to engage with people who are seeing things so differently there’s no hope, but sometimes I’m flabbergasted and can’t help myself. There was a mashup reel of the president talking about Karoline Leavitt’s lips “moving like a machine gun” (again), and another of him repeatedly calling the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a “beautiful young woman” - giving a little wink and an eyeroll because, “you lose your political career in America if you say that.” There was a clip of him refusing to answer a reporter’s question but calling her “Darling” and saying she was attractive, commenting on her looks to JD Vance sitting next to him - who laughed and nodded.

It’s nothing new, it’s a lifelong pattern of behavior that anyone with eyes can see - the man does not respect women, and the only women who survive in his inner circle are the ones who allow him to objectify them - this includes his own daughter. I commented to that effect. A man told me these were “just compliments” and if these women didn’t mind, why should I? Another said I should “spare him the victimhood.” Boys will be boys. Don’t be so sensitive. It’s just locker room talk. None of it surprised me, and I didn’t bother answering.

Then a woman told me to save my “fake outage” and not to worry, because maybe someday someone would call me beautiful, too. Pretty sure she meant “fake outrage.” I responded to her.

I told her if I became outraged every time this president did something inappropriate, I’d be dead and buried long ago. I said men like him have been harassing me and “cutting me down to size” my whole life - on the streets of NYC where I was born and raised, in academic settings, in work settings, online - everywhere I have ever tried to take up space as a full human being. Men who wanted me to believe my value is measured by how I look instead of who I am - and that I was surprised she didn’t relate, since almost every woman I know has experienced the same thing.

I was fired up by then, and said I found it incredible that she was defending a man who bragged that he “grabs women by the pussy” - a man who got Ghislaine Maxwell transferred to a minimum security prison when she should be behind bars along with all the men who hurt little girls - and yet here she was being obnoxious to me, a person she probably has a lot more in common with, all things considered.

Some things still surprise me, like the women who can’t see through this kind of man, and other things don’t surprise me at all. Nothing surprised me less than the Telegram messages that were exchanged between leaders of the Young Republicans, because this is exactly what you get when the leader of your entire party says things about legal Haitian immigrants during the election such as, “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” - and people still vote for him.

This is what you get when the president of the United States is an adjudicated rapist whose supporters yell “witch hunt” when you say that - even the women. This is what you get when you run on a ticket with a man who says childless cat ladies are the problem with this country, and if Americans want affordable childcare, they should ask their mothers-in-law to move in. What else would post-menopausal women be doing?

This is what you get when your party lionizes a man who went to college campuses and talked over Black students, queer students, transgender students, and young women - dismissing their lived experience like it meant fucking nothing.

This is what you get when the man running for president accuses his opponent of “turning Black” for political expedience.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said during the NABJ interview.

He went on to say that “she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went -- she became a Black person.”

This is exactly what you get when the president of the United States posts deep fake videos of Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero.

If you missed this story, the long and short of it is that leaders of the Young Republicans - the oldest political youth organization in the country - were exchanging unbelievably racist, sexist, pro-rapey, pro-slavery, anti-Semetic, misogynistic text messages over Telegram - and those messages were leaked on Tuesday.

There are 2,900 pages of texts - conversations happening between leaders of Young Republicans chapters in New York, Kansas, Vermont and Arizona. These people are 24-35 years old - one is a state senator. They are not “kids” - and Harry Sisson put the faces of these grown men (and one woman) together with the despicable texts they sent, if you would like to see the extent to which these are fully grown adults.

This is noteworthy, because the man second in line to the presidency put his gaslighty-arrogant-punch-me-in-the-face pants on, and said kids say dumb things all the time, and especially boys, and he was going to teach his sons not to put anything like this on the internet (how about you teach them not to be racist, bigoted lowlifes and then you won’t have to worry about what they say to friends in a group chat, JD!) because you never know when some “scumbag” is going to leak it to try to ruin you or your family.

He said thank god the things he did when he was a teenager are not out there on the internet, these were “edgy jokes” - “I love Hitler” is so edgy - and he refuses to “clutch his pearls” over it. He followed all of that up with this tweet, which in normal times would be enough to have him removed from Office, along with the entire Cabinet including the president:

The texts are “very tame” compared to the “banter” you hear in the Oval Office every day? Seriously? The fact that this is not disqualifying is devastating. These people do not belong anywhere near the Oval Office, full stop. They never did.

It’s also very interesting that he wants to make twenty-five to forty-year-old white men “kids” but if a twelve-year-old girl gets raped, this same man thinks she should become a mother. This administration wants fourteen-year-olds in D.C to be tried as adults, but the people in this group chat are kids?

JD sounds so much like the judges who talk about the “fine young men” who made “one mistake” and oops! raped a girl, and how they have so much potential - and this one horrible “lapse in judgment” shouldn’t ruin the rest of their lives. Do you know how many girls and women don’t report assaults as a result?

I would really love to talk to these judges, because allow me to say, the young people in those courtrooms with all the potential are the young girls or women sitting there - hoping now that they’ve been brave enough to come forward, justice will be served.

Fuck every last one of those judges, and JD, too, because he’s an smarmy, soulless prick, and a hack writer. Mamaw my ass. If I were Catholic I’d say some Hail Marys but I’m not, so I’ll do some extra sun salutes tomorrow. Sometimes you have to let the rage out - that’s another coping mechanism.

Also, through his venture capital firm Narya Capital, JD’s invested in AcreTrader - an online marketplace that allows investors from all over the world to buy shares in American farmland - especially if it’s in foreclosure. Wait. What? That sounds like a huge conflict of interest at a time when farmers are really hurting because of this administration. There is nothing to indicate he has divested, nor is there anything to indicate he could find his integrity with both hands and a lifetime supply of eyeliner. You might have gathered I cannot stand the guy.

Back to the Telegram texts:

“The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

‘The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public,” said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociology professor who has studied racism for the last 60 years. He’s also concerned the words would be applied to public policy. “It’s chilling, of course, because they will act on these views.’”

They will act on these views.

They already are. The Supreme Court seems determined to further undercut the Voting Rights Act, the government is still shut down, the administration is not working to reopen the government - instead they are trying to extort Democrats to get them to sign another clean CR. They’ve withheld $25 billion Congress appropriated for projects in Democrat-led states and cities (impounding funds again, why stop now), they have no plans for affordable healthcare for Americans, and ICE agents are attacking citizens for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

There are signs of life, and reasons to have hope, though. Kegseth tried to enforce state-run media this week à la North Korea, but everyone gave him the big FU, even Fox News. Airports are refusing to play Kristi Noem’s propaganda video about how it’s all the Democrats’ fault. And about 75 million people are planning to meet up this Saturday to remind these cosplaying fascists that there are more of us than them, and we get to decide who we’re going to be. We, the people.

So many things can influence you in this world. There may be events from your past that hurt. In my better moments, it’s easy for me to see that the people doing the most damage right now are the ones whose pain has hardened into something they turn outward, like the thorns on a rose.

Maybe someday they’ll realize it feels a lot better to put down the armor and show up with love. Maybe they’ll remember what it felt like to walk through the world feeling scared and uncertain, vulnerable and overwhelmed, confused and small…but openhearted. I’ll choose that every time. We’re in relationship with everything - each other, the planet, the night sky, our neighbors. We get to decide what we put in the space between us and everything else. What other people do is up to them. We weren’t promised a rose garden, friends, but we can still plant beautiful seeds.

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