CHAPTER 19; Part 2: She and I Aren’t Really Married
From "The Saga of One F**ked Mother"
“She and I Aren’t Really Married” is Chapter 19 of Mother-Fucking: The Saga of One Fucked Mother.
In Part 2 of this chapter, Legion is shocked and horrified that Herry has told the boys they are not really married. She recognizes, looking back, that Herry’s newfound, born-again “churchiness” was part of his revenge prep—to look good in Family Court for his upcoming bid to take custody of the boys away from her. This awakens Legion’s disgust for organized religion and its foundational misogyny and oppression.
In Part 1 of this chapter, Legion is forced to endure a summer road trip with her abusive mother who harangues her about separating from Herry. She regrets having agreed to her boys spending every weekend with Herry, only later realizing that was the first step in his undermining of her relationship with her boys. As part of that erosion process, Herry tells the boys that Legion and he are not really married.
Dr. Blue’s novel is based on her own experience of the Custody Crisis. It uniquely conveys how Family Court judges are “mother-fucking” women—a form of systemic oppression and violence directed at ex-wives—as protagonist Legion is systematically and methodically deprived of her children and money and reduced to “one fucked mother”.
Chapters are stand-alone interesting so you can begin reading anywhere. A Cast of Characters follows to help readers at any point. All published chapters are included in the Section: “Saga of One F**ked Mother” accessible on the top bar of the home page of Women’s Coalition News & Views. Sequential chapters are published every Wednesday and subscribers will find them in their inboxes, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet!
TEASERS
Simply stated, it meant that … I was bad. And that they, too, Jesse, Mirzah and Zane, as growths out of and extensions from me, were also bad. That is what “not married” meant.
This incredibly excessive churchiness of Herry’s would look so, so good on a pillared father in family law court going after sole custody of Mirzah, Jesse and Zane along with the maximum child support charted by statute—as if he were loaded for bear.
CHAPTER 19; Part 2
She and I Aren’t Really Married
“This is the relationship we should all aspire to. The hierarchy which has subordinated men, you will be taught, established matriarchy as the way in which God can be correctly related to and spoken about.”
—Dr. Anne Primavesi, From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity; 1991: Chapter Seven, p. 139
This autumnal day of Zane’s question to me was still two years away from The Conversation, the conversation about belief systems and the entire fallibility of the World’s so‑called “great religions” that just the two of us, Daddy and I, finally did engage in while we were both cleaning paint brushes in the Havencourt basement. The one where AmTaham True actually apologized to me, his adult child, for having all 40 of my years forced me to exactingly and punctiliously attend this male‑mandated thing called christian worship service and sunday school for all of my first two decades of life.
Coming as it did—that conversation—58 years! after AmTaham True, himself, had been forced by his German American head schoolmaster, Herr Minister So‑And‑So, to “believe what it is I tell you to believe!”—the controlling Herr Minister’s right index finger repeatedly thumping and thrusting itself deep into AmTaham’s 12‑year‑old chest after Herr Minister had first yanked him up and out of his desk chair and screamed this commanding order at the Adolescent AmTaham in front of all of his classmates. Just because Daddy had in 1931, to the then so‑called teacher, raised a hand in rebuttal and proceeded to recount to the rest of the roomful about the bones of a monkey‑like critter known as Lucy which had earlier been unearthed during that mid 1920s’ decade somewhere way off on a continent known as Africa. A truly classic “textbook” case in history‑making and, subsequently, in history‑teaching to the World’s next generation of George Orwell’s, “He who controls the present controls the past; and he who controls the past, controls the future.”
And, further still, I had had to go through this phallic fiat of regularly attending christianity‑grounded rituals after AmTaham not only knew how he himself felt about them and their religious canons but also after he had discussed all of this issue in gargantuan detail for several years with Rowland, Wyman and Sterling, my uncle, my first and dearest cousin and my only brother, all of the men closest to me as my male relatives. AmTaham had debated on this massive a matter with none of us female children—or cousins or aunts or sisters. Were we, AmTaham’s three daughters, even then not worthy of enough respect and honor to have been included in a man’s philosophical and religious discussions, especially in one where repudiation and disavowal of something he did not at all believe in was at issue?! Not even then!
This, unlike my Daddy in Chapter Eighteen I have to say, is one of the very, very, very few times that I, as a child of his, am really angry and truly disgusted with AmTaham True. He hadn’t even respected me enough, his own child—and that disrespect of his appears to me to have been because I am a female—to entrust me with such a disclosure as to this belief, or more accurately, as to this non‑belief of his. And, as importantly, I and at least my two sisters had been made to suffer as well as to suffer through the ultimate hypocrisy and these so‑dangerous‑to‑our‑spirits’ teachings for years and more years by having to attend and (at the least for me) feign belief in these christian rituals, this unscience! these untruths! throughout all of our childhoods.
Why? To keep us daughters so in fear of our own sexual desires and longings through our hating our breasts and our vaginas? Our G‑spots and clitorises? Our very own blood … for chris’s sake?!!!! Loathing ourselves through religious canons pontificating on and on about our own vileness and filth and that we should be so–so careful with our purities so as to not ever become sullied, not to mention, PG!—preggers!—pregnant?! Thereby, dare I say it—supposedly embarrassing, humiliating, dishonoring the beJESUS out of the males in our families?! Just “allow” us … chemical birth control, for fucks’ sake!
* * * *
“Wha’da’ya s’pose he meant by that?” I repeated it now to all of them more or less—or was it to myself? And the thin air. I did not think I could stall my reply any longer. Zane, Jesse and Mirzah had been raised up all of their short lives within the near lily white, Anglo‑Germanic culture of christianity, including such manner for marrying, even if they themselves had not been made to suffer its practices, schedules, canons and conventions … its dogma. Their daycares except for when we were able to have a quality nanny in our home and their schooling except for Mirzah’s four‑year‑old months at a Missouri Montessori, had also all been public and much of it in a Midwest setting—through three different plains states. That culture, too. Here, they full well knew, even Mirzah did, what “not married” would mean. For them, for me, for the culture where we all lived—or at least they could imagine what “that kind” of a woman‑man relationship means.
Simply stated, it meant that … I was bad. And that they, too, Jesse, Mirzah and Zane, as growths out of and extensions from me, were also bad. That is what “not married” meant. And that was the reason for their gazing stares up at me now. Nowhere in those lovely and sorrowful azure eyes of theirs could I see that … Herry was bad. Just me and just them. Or, that there was some kind of mistake on Herry’s part here.
We, the four of us, we were somehow … wrong. Wrong at whatever we had been calling “our lives.” Herry, the man, the male of the woman‑man couple, was The Standard Measure of things. And, thereby also, not wrong, of course. If he says we are not really married and since he is the man and would, by that fact alone therefore know,––and around whom then all things should be measured and standardized, then we were not married. And we four? We were, therefore, bad. Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had spoken. Had “spoken about” ... us.
That? That had done it for me. Those six sad eyes and that unstated but collective understanding of ours—were exactly for me what the Herr schoolmaster’s index finger—thumps into 12‑year‑old AmTaham’s breastbone had been for him. This mother‑fucking shit slopping straight out of Herry’s mouth to the ears of all of my little Boys not only was breaking their little Spirits, it’d just, indeed, made all of those Sons of mine ... ... bastards. And a truer non‑believer out of me and my Spirit there could not have been more instantly created!
Ironic and peculiarly queer it was that this aversion of mine to patriarchal religiosity should happen to me at just the very time that Herry began taking up any, let alone, excessive churchiness again. For all of the entire time that I had known Dr. Herod Edinsmaier which by this Autumn of 1988, numbered right at 14½ years, Herry so highly prized countenancing himself off as—and loudly proclaimed to any and to all who may wonder or actually inquire if he were—an atheist. From my and others including his family members, particularly his mother and father, personally witnessing these exchanges with other people and his regular daily deportment and demeanor regarding anything spiritual or god‑based, it was easy for all of us to see that Herry was not only an atheist but a vehemently professing one at that!
Because of this, religion and even spirituality or faith in anything beyond one’s self were never the subjects of any discussions between the two of us. Ever. And while Dr. Edinsmaier never outright stopped me from taking the Boys to the very, very few christian worship services, all of them lutheran until their becoming all Quaker Silences commencing in November 1983, that I did take them to, he also never accompanied us to any of them at all either. Except for the very first couple to three times we all went to Quaker meeting in Missouri, First Day meetings for worship there on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, that was it for him. Nor did he, having been raised up in a family of 14 pregnancies in 20 years with 12 term births and 11 living children a stout roman catholic by rabidly devout parents and siblings one of whom, herself a catholic sister who had left her nunneryness in order to marry not just any guy but a guy who had been a practicing catholic priest, attend anything catholic along the way of our growing family. And before my 10 March 1974 meeting him at the Campustown saloon – discothèque or our having any children whatsoever together, Herry‑Daddee had not been attending anything catholic either. I think not since his being totally away from things and matters parental had Herry been avowing anything catholic. Or, anything just plain christian, for that matter.
“Wha’da’ya s’pose he meant by that?” I had asked Zane.
“Well, Herry said that since … aah, aah, a priest kind of a guy didn’t say the words on the day of you and Herry being at the church, it didn’t actually count for him and you getting married. An’, and … aah, Herry also said that, aah, it was the wrong kind of church, too. Was it, Mom?”
* * * *
True it was: This vitriolic shitfuck from Herry was ... had to be ... The Last Straw. Absolutely. I had never, ever heard of such a horrible thing to say to one’s children, one’s little, little children. Or, about one’s marriage to the mother of those same youngsters. Never. I had never heard of such a massively hypocritical statement about the history of a man with a woman, any woman, let alone, with me.
Is it any wonder then that I absolutely abhor christianity? Or, anything that smacks of patriarchally mandated canons or androcentric precepts of organized religion? Of organized male‑generated or male‑initiated religions or belief systems or alleged ‘faiths’ anywhere in the entire World?
In one itty bitty dictum by a vehemently professed atheist––now however attending a christian worship service and one which was roman catholic of course every single weekday noontime plus late Saturday afternoons as well, that is six goddamn days out of every seven––Dr. Herod Edinsmaier had so tyrannically leveled for me and for my Boys any kind of a family life and structure which I had built up for them. All 12‑plus years of it. Linguistically torn down and smashed into shambles by Despot Herry‑Daddee’s declaration of it—his declaration of us all—as nothing more than a shameful sham.
I would come to find out a wee bit later: No one exacts and works revenge like Herod Edinsmaier exacts and works it. This incredibly excessive churchiness of Herry’s would look so, so good on a pillared father in family law court going after sole custody of Mirzah, Jesse and Zane along with the maximum child support charted by statute— as if he were loaded for bear. “Always, always workin’ the angles, aren’tcha’ Herry?!”
One time, a Tuesday noontime it was, I went just to see for myself if what I had been hearing was really true or not. And sure enough: there he was, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier. Before the same altar of the same church, st. thomas saniqua catholic church, as was that of the pulpit and domain of a squatty, robed man by the name of “father” james elppus, the very same (so noooot so) “reverend” who had screamed into our Pammel Court apartment’s telephone receiver in September 1976, when Herry and I were seeking christian baptism for Zane in a joint lutheran/catholic ceremony that I was a slattern and a slut and that Zane was, indeed, my bastard baby boy. And that there would be no friggin’ way, not even in a frozen‑over hell’s worth of existence, that he, elppus, would ever, ever preside over any such “sacred” event for Zane––jointly with the lutherans next door across the parking lot at the memorial lutheran church or any which way otherwise either. And, furthermore, elppus lambasted me that he would immediately upon his hanging up be contacting that other local one of his ilk, the st. cecil’s catholic church (the house of the lord’s gymnasium, we recall, wherein in a wee dozen years’ time to come would be Herry‑Daddee’s frotteuristic grope of Grace at my second‑born Jesse’s and her Nathan’s youth basketball game) and warn the priests over there, too, of this evil plot by a whore and her misbegot whoreson! That … “reverend”.
Sure enough: right there in this midst all right shone Dr. Herry Edinsmaier genuflecting and making the sign of the cross and kneeling and singing hallelujahs and bowing his head while appearing to left and right murmur long ago‑memorized prayer phrases just as fast and as catholically correct as all of the other parishioners around him … all of whom that noon were either old, blue‑haired ladies or twenty‑something female college students, plain in their dress and plain in their faces. Yup!––all on a Tuesday at about 12:10 in the mother‑fucking afternoon.
I had been brought down. All the mother‑fucking way down. Again. By a guy healing himself? Riiiight. These words to Jesse and to Zane and to Mirzah, these were the words and this was the act of a pornography‑consuming and -supplying, narcissistic, exhibitionistic, passive‑aggressive, misogynistic hypocrite. Who was anything but healed or healing. Or ... ever intending to try to!
By far and away, it was and it remains the hypocrisy of the man, Dr. Edinsmaier, that then stopped and that, right now, continues to stop me from any possible chance at being duped any further. I am unable, if I am to keep my dignity and my integrity from being thrown again into the toilet and flushed, to allow myself to be made again stupid by this mother‑fucker.
That day I began to believe I was never going to know marriage to Herry Edinsmaier any longer. Nor ever again.
Still. I did not then know just how unmarried, if we were or were not before now, ... just how unmarried we were about to become. For the unwed and unbound part, I should have fallen on my knees in grateful praise and thanksgiving. To pagan goddesses or, rather, to my wonderful, strong and finally freed Goddess‑Self, of course. As to the amount and the type of violence to follow, I knew nothing then of what women’s shelters the World over know: When a woman either leaves a man—or tells that man to leave and to only return when he’s sorry and able to acknowledge his wrongdoing and injustices and is willing not only to try to but also actually changes himself—then … then is when She the Woman is most at risk and in great, grave danger. The violence and the vengeance that He the Man—and a pillared one to boot—will unleash and be able to come at her with and to wield against her will be of such force and magnitude the likes of which she cannot even begin to imagine at the first. As Mama Kay finds out in Godfather III when she has not only been cast away but Husband Corleone has sashayed on over to the soirée at the vatican bastille of that particular exalted, all‑male bastion, “When they come, they’ll come at what ya’ love.”
O o o o so, so true this is. Even with my Ancestors alongside me, thousands and thousands and millennial years of them beside me and mightily unlike the dude in the story of Amistad, I stood not a chance against the evil broiling within the boiling brain of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier.
I turned directly into the full view of my three lovely Boys’ faces, “No, Zane, no. It was not the wrong church at all. Your daddy and I are married. And that happened, as you and Jesse and Mirzah have long been told before, on the 18th day of December in 1976, just about exactly four months after you were born. Lots and lots of friends came and all of your grandmas and grandpas were there, too. It was a beautiful wedding, and you? You were such a good, good little boy all during the whole deal.”
He had been, too. That much was … true. Even if Herry now wanted to deny that it, the marriage between him and me, had ever happened; and, of course since he was the man—and now such a “religious” man at that—why he certainly could do just that. But even with that, Dr. Edinsmaier could not deny that my Baby Boy Zane whom Herry’s present priest, elppus ... such a “godly” a guy himself ... was loathe to have called a bastard, had been, throughout whatever ceremony it was that had taken place on that particular early Saturday afternoon at Ames’ memorial lutheran church, The Most Wonderful Wedding Baby Ever.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Dr. Legion True: One Fucked Mother
Dr. Herod (Herry) Edinsmaier: Legion’s husband/Sperm Source [“re: I am snide” backwards]
Zane Truemaier: Legion’s son
Jesse Truemaier: Legion’s son
Mirzah Truemaier: Legion’s son
AmTaham True: Legion’s father [Mahatma backwards]
Mehitable True: Legion’s mother [Me hit-able—i.e. she was abusive]
Ardys and Endys: Legion’s sisters [names backwards]
Sterling: Legion’s brother [her mother’s planned name of next son (who never came)]
Mi Sprision O'Revinnoco: Herry’s sister [misprision: concealing knowledge of treason/O'Revinnoco = O'Connivero backwards]
Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier: Legion’s father-in-law [juggernaut; aut = 0; misein = “to hate (misogyny)”]
Detanimod Edinsmaier: Legion’s mother-in-law [dominated backwards]
Fannie Issicran McLive: fawning enabler of ex [narcissi(st) and Mc(Evil) backwards]
Legion’s Friends: Yanira, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane, Kincaid, Joseph, Sheryl
Legion’s Best Friends: Ms Grace and Dr Lionel Portia
Wende: = Legion's friend after divorce [committed suicide due to Custody Crisis]
Jim Cornball: Herry’s acquaintance from AA and realtor
Loser Lorn: Insurance agent referred by Cornball
Judge Harley Butcher: Family Court judge
Judge Sol Wacotler Seizor: Family Court judge
Judge Barry Crowrook: Appellate Court judge
Judge Pansy Shawshank: Appellate Court judge
Jazzy Jinx: Legion’s Family Court lawyer who sold her out
Shindy Scheisser: Herry’s lawyer [shindy = noisy; scheisser = German for shithead]
Li Zhang: Herry’s Aussie affair
Dr Freddie Goldstein & Ella: Herry’s colleague and wife
Mick: = Herry's acquaintance from high school; best man [not in Herry’s life after that as he had no true friends]
Varry Wussamai: Herry's AA sponsor (not a real friend) [I am a wuss backwards]
David Humes: nursing student; classmate of Legion's, y1968 - y1971, New York City
Edmund Silver: Legion's boyfriend pre-Herry
Braemore St: where Legion and her family lived, y1983 - y1986
Havencourt condominium: Legion's Ames apartment; after separation
Zephyr: tabby cat of Zane's, Mirzah's, Jesse's [pronounced “Zay – fear”]
Author: Dr. Blue, aka Ofherod, BSN, DVM, PhD = Commander Edinsmaier's Handmaid (Commander reiamsnidE's Handmaid)
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