CHAPTER 19: 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. [This chapter is too long for a newsletter so the second part will be posted next week.]
In this chapter, Legion is forced to endure a real car wreck of a summer road trip to Wisconsin with her abusive mother who harangues her about separating from Herry, as she views his status and money-making potential her ticket in old age. Legion has to constantly defend herself in front of her boys, much like with Herry, with whom her mother shares many personality defects. She muses how women are expected to tolerate men’s infidelities and faults and how organized religion plays into male domination in the family.
Legion regrets having agreed to her boys spending every weekend with Herry, not realizing that was the first step in the undermining and alienating process. She still believes Herry is trying to get better so he can come home, but her oldest son tells her something that severely challenges that belief…
In the last chapter, “The Company One’s Mind Keeps”, Legion is determined to enjoy a wonderful summer with her kids despite Herry being gone. She continues to naïvely believe Herry is actively working on reforming his sexual addiction and misogynistic faults and that this is helped along by his mind keeping better company than in the past.
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 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: 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
At no time during those first days of Mehitable’s finally knowing that Herry’d left, was I, her very child and from my own mother’s lips then—or any day since, given simple, unconditional understanding, empathy and compassion…Always, always defending myself I was. And always, always in front of Mirzah, Jesse and Zane as well.
“No other subordinated class, caste or minority lives as closely integrated with its oppressor as women do; the males of the dominant culture have to allow them into their homes, kitchens, beds. Control at these close quarters can be maintained only by inducing women to consent to their own downgrading.”
CHAPTER 19
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
Wandering around Wisconsin, the five of us, was soooo not fun. No car crash per se but certainly everything else about Mehitable, Zane, Jesse, Mirzah and me traipsing hither and yon seemed as if there’d been a smashup of some sort somewhere. As, of course, there had been. Back home.
Mehitable and especially AmTaham arrived at our house about the second of July just so excited and most open to good news. I hadn’t any for them. Not good enough at any rate to outweigh and override the very real fact that Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s mother‑in‑law no longer had her rather assumed assurance, by my being legally bound to that certain 40s‑something doctor with lots of future earning potential, of a smooth and easy old age for herself. To say the least, Mehitable True was not at all pleased to learn that I was minus one more husband—that I was minus this particular one, that is.
Her self‑centered outlook was, well, one very much along the lines of that of Ms. Ruth DeWitt Bukater’s, Rose’s embittered mother on board the elitist Titanic—the fated ship, according to James Cameron’s sinking of it anyhow. Mehitable was most hopping mad at me just as that film’s director had depicted Ms. DeWitt Bukater to also be at her daughter who seemed to her mother to continuously—and purposefully—be blowing the arranged betrothal to Rose’s millionaire fiancé, Cal Hockley, “Do you want to see me working as a seamstress? Is that what you want? Do you want to see our fine things sold at auction, our memories scattered to the winds? My God, Rose, how can you be so selfish?” I could just envision Mehitable, who blind though she be and herself completely unable to sew for some several years now anyhow, laying on the heavy, heavy guilt as our own scene, much like the movie’s, concluded, “Of course, it’s unfair! We’re women. Our choices are never easy!”
Not that Mehitable True ever, ever had a damn thing to concern herself about as regards AmTaham’s fidelity, but Mehitable also thought, very often right out loud, and behaved just like Ms. DeWitt Bukater did––and just like Wyly King’s wife, Georgia, did, too. Those all‑too‑common, parentally unaccountable, unprotecting and horribly and purposefully endangering 1950’s American mothers of daughters! Georgia King told her own daughter, Grace, in Something To Talk About after Grace’s husband, Eddie Bichon, mother‑fucked Grace by sleeping around all over town, “Now as funny as it may seem, it’s up to you to set things right again!” JYeah, like … Wrong …! In exactly whose universe is it up to the betrayed woman in the philandering man’s life to “set things right again?!” Soooo not in mine and not in the universes of any such women whom I know. That’s for damn straight. Let him … deal with it …! Let him deal with the fallout of his own willful and stupid choices. Not us.
At Mehitable’s behest, I was switching vehicles with AmTaham, Daddy ending up with our Shit‑Box Dodge of a wagon to use till we returned and I delivered his wife back to his doorstep in the Burg. In the process of heading out and readying the Baby Blue, AmTaham’s bustleback Seville and from which Caddy’s luxuriously leather rear I had had for just ever to continuously take from a controlling and meddlesome Mehitable backseat‑driving directions and directives this way and that as to how to conduct and improve my piloting, I mentioned something to Grandpa AmTaham as Mirzah, now only 2½ months shy of his tenth birthday, happily helped us both with the loading. “Say, Daddy, I happen to think Mirzah here is growing up into the absolute kindest person I’ve ever known to walk the face of the Earth.”
An ever so slight but definitely proud smile pulled at both corners of AmTaham’s mouth as he glanced sideways and twinkled toward Mirzah who was resolutely piling three little overnight bags, his own and his two bros’ too, into the Blue’s trunk, “You do, do you?!” A hoisting effort Mirzah made with that unique lower lip of his firmly pushed inward and with his front, top incisors clenching down on it while pretending not to make too much of my and his Grandpa’s complimenting comments.
“I do, Daddy,” repeatedly nodding, I answered in a most solemn tone also feigning a rather matter‑of‑fact seriousness to my demeanor, same as was Mirzah’s. When, in reality, I was so warmed, so made calmed and imbued with reason regarding things of the future by this youth and was so filled with awe that, just in that transitory moment out there on the Othello driveway beside two of the greatest people ever I had met in my life, I knew AmTaham knew, too, how bursting inside I felt at having grown and borne such a wondrous little person who, from so very, very early on, just knew how to be around all other people it seemed.
Mirzah, his glowing golden hair not yet turning too much darker from its dazzling platinum color which all three of the Truemaier Boys had countenanced when they were first such gorgeous babies, had had the least amount of time on the Planet to get to know either AmTaham or me due, of course, to his happenstance placement as third child of mine and as the very last one of seven grandchildren, all of them grandsons, for AmTaham. But true it is: such a sweeter disposition, a more loving nature and a purer, exquisitely inquisitive desire to learn new stuff every single day I had never witnessed in someone else before Mirzah. It was most evident to me, seriously or even kidding around‑wise, that here before us two adult Trues stood one mightily fine human being, the likes out of which composition future dalai lamas and mahatmas are made.
Mirzah had patience. Patience not unlike Grandpa AmTaham himself possessed. With AmTaham’s and my states of deafness, we both could always, always count on Mirzah, without our first pleading or even initially summoning him to come up closely to us, to enunciate clearly and to repeat himself if need be. And ... as often as need be. With none of this ordinary, routine effort on Mirzah’s part did he ever manifest the least bit of snippiness, impudence, flippancy or snide attitude. Most unlike Herry’s demeanor or even Mehitable’s so‑called adult behaviors to both AmTaham and to me with our deafness. Here was a mere kid who at four, five, six, seven years of age actually appeared to know what it must be like to be deaf and, for that matter with a verisimilar approach to the same type of interactions with his Grandma Mehitable, to be blind, too!
You liked a certain jacket or this or that toy of his? Off its hook and out of the toy box, then, came the garment and the plaything or game—and it was yours. Not just to borrow, not just to use for a while although you were most welcome to do that, too, if you liked; but it was yours to take home with you. And keep. Period. I remember these acts of Mirzah’s back in Pennsylvania and Missouri so, so well. And often. Nearly every day and unquestionably every week or so.
It was like Mirzah was a Mennonite or a Quaker long before he’d ever even heard of a meetinghouse somewhere and had taken into direct action for himself a creed and the discipline to perform continual acts of charities during his childhood. Deeds that he could only have imagined or have been innately provided the knowledge and the will to know about and to do because he was somehow more endowed with or cloaked in things spiritual and ancestral than any other babe I had met. Because while I, in those early years of Mirzah’s, had taken him and his two brothers just a very few times, less than half a dozen is all probably, to a lutheran church worship on Sunday mornings, Mirzah had never once attended a christian sunday school group or, as a matter of fact, a class that was taught by anyone of the World’s other organized and so‑called great religions on any other day of the week either. Mirzah had not had any other adults, professing their own holiness or to being priestly, authoritatively telling him he ought to obey this or that religious rule or canon or to do good works or to be kind or to make all of his everyday actions honorable. None of that—formally, that is. Still. He did. Mirzah was a morally good, good atheist boy.
AmTaham I could tell was beaming inside while gazing upon his youngest progeny so helpful here while listening to me, his littlest’s ma, joyously cite such common incidences of Mirzah’s open hand and kind heart. I found it very easy to read my daddy. Maybe because we shared the same Winter Solstice birth date, therefore the same stars, maybe because we silently both shared being unable to hear very well in a World most impatient and imbecilic around deaf individuals, maybe because I was simply so, so like him also possessing that passion for learning the relationships of things and words and concepts to each other and, most likely of all the reasons, because I had adored and loved AmTaham for just ever—was I mighty good at perceiving his bent or penchant at any particular time on any particular matter.
And AmTaham was thinking that Mirzah was, indeed, special. AmTaham couldn’t go to Wisconsin with us, but I imagined he was spinning his circuits on just what he could swing with regard to time off for himself, once we all came back, so that he could spend more and more time with his Truemaier grandsons, especially with this one—of whom he had not come to know for as long as he had Jesse and Zane.
* * * *
The Boys and I returned this person, Mehitable, to Williamsburg and to AmTaham True a few days after the Fourth of July. This entire particular 1988 road trip through Wisconsin’s summertime, whether to her fat, motor‑mouthed self propped up and plopped down into the very middle of Blue’s backseat or to her packed and boulder‑like form hovering on the edge of a motel room’s crushed mattress or after my first having to listen to her whine from a bench seat in one of the gaudiest corners of The House on the Rock, I had to answer, to explain, to defend. Always, always defending myself I was. And always, always in front of Mirzah, Jesse and Zane as well.
Hardly an ‘Independence’ Day, Mehitable’s leveling of charges of inferiority, idiocy and hopelessness left me with the near‑ultimate in the deliberate undermining and the fucking over of a mother’s authority—by a mother. At no time during those first days of Mehitable’s finally knowing that Herry’d left, was I, her very child and from my own mother’s lips then—or any day since, given simple, unconditional understanding, empathy and compassion. Let alone, any manner of emotional backing that one gives another, that one gives any other, who has been wronged. As in … unspeakably, unconscionably and morally wronged and is deep within the throes of injustice. This specific mother did not grant me even the very least benefit of the doubt as to why our marriage had gone south, not to mention, go herself to The Mat and The Ends of the Earth to support, let alone sustain and uplift, me—her child. Dr. Phyllis Chesler speaks to this genre of adult woman’s mother and her kids’ grandmother in her voluminous and stunning 1989 bedrock piece, Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody as well. Some female Ancestor this predator of her own young is ... As the mother I myself was then as Mehitable’s adult child and as the mother and the grandmother who I now am, I shall not forget this. Mehitable’s behavior. Ever. I shall never, never forget this.
We—Zane, Jesse, Mirzah and I—came back to Ames and Othello Drive to try to pick up the pieces of this family smashup and, at the very least, have somewhat of a memorable half summer or so still left that I’d earlier promised myself I was going to try so hard to give my Boys. I cannot remember now, however, hardly any more of that summer, that autumn and the end of that calendar year—other than a very few smatterings. One of those things I do remember and a most grievous error on my part for agreeing to the arrangement at all: Every single Friday night through Sunday night they, my Sons, through every single weekend of all of those months, were all gone from me and from our family home, Herry’s bachelor pad. And they—Mirzah, Jesse and Zane—were about to be truly missing to me. In every sense of that word: missing. I should have been preparing myself to flee. I mean that. Literally. I should have been preparing myself to flee the country with them. Instead of what I was about—which was trying so hard, especially when I was falling asleep alone at night, to believe that Herry was off healing himself so that he could come back to us all.
* * * *
“Herry told us he wasn’t really married to you.”
On my journey back to the Boys’ bedroom, it was Zane’s voice coming straight up at me from his play down on the carpet as I passed through the vastness of that living room in the Forest that in it could’ve held a full‑sized grand piano and wedding receptions. In my periphery, I saw both Mirzah’s and Jesse’s heads come bolt upright from their Lego block constructions. All six of their ears probably perked up, too, just like their heads had jerked up, all of them collectively awaiting whatever response from me.
“What? What’d you say, Honey?”
“Herry told Jesse and Mirzah and me that he wasn’t really ever married to you at all.” The Boys only and always addressed their father—because of Herry’s own totalitarian commandment—by his first name. Never by “Daddy” or “Father”, “Papa” or “Pa”, “Pops” or “Poppy”. In my entire lifetime, I have never, never, ever heard any one of my three children call the man whose haploid sperm spawned them all “Dad”.
“I see. This was when? He said this to you when?” I asked, buying some time. When I was in veterinary medical school studying to be a practitioner, we students were coached, that when trying to diagnose during a simple office visit or a farm call, to play for more time. Take Bessie’s temperature; stick that thermometer in, then plug the stethoscope into your ears and listen to her abomasum. This would buy you, the doc, some quiet and probably uninterrupted thinking time.
And was I ever trying to think now of what Herry was up to. Just exactly, I am quizzing myself, how did this short statement of Zane’s to me right now sound anything like self‑inventory, self‑assessment and a treatment or healing if it, indeed, had come to them from Herry? And what was he doing saying such stuff at all to little Boys? Let alone, to children who were hearing this as if it were a father’s personal August and September birthday presents to them!? More upheaval and now this, this bolt, this ambuscade coming square at them was happening right around the six‑week period when all of their birthdays are celebrated. Jesse was now 10, Zane 12 and Mirzah 9, by that autumn and next, new school year. My Boys’ summer had again ended. And as nowhere at all near the fun‑filled and relaxing one that I had meant for it to be for them.
“Last time we were there.”
The 24th Street one‑bedroom apartment had quickly changed for Herry to an even smaller‑sized one on Ames’ South Fourth Street. He must have contacted the same realtor who initially had secured for him a residence in that first 24 hours of Herry’s egress. This second apartment existed in a much larger, brick building complex, probably one with laundry machines although I have no idea. His was a studio. When I dropped the Boys off there on a couple of Friday evenings and the front door to Herry’s unit opened, one was greeted immediately by a nearly‑bare double bed, only white sheets and one cased bed pillow upon it, stretching out lengthwise perpendicularly to the doorway and about four steps in from it and parallel to the faux walnut‑grain television set at the bed’s foot. A wee bit further in to the apartment’s one total room was the kitchenette to the left with its very small table straight ahead and positioned underneath the studio’s one window to the south. Two beige kitchen chairs, each with plastic seat covers tucked under them, were shoved upside the table. Immediately to the right of the “dining area” and nearly lost into the lone room’s back corner stood a simple pole lamp beside an orange vinyl reading chair. That was it.
Why had Dr. Edinsmaier, still of course, in possession of his single‑engine and his twin‑engine flying machines housed out at a behemoth of a hanger–“apartment” due west of Manhattan, Kansas, two states away––why had Herry‑Daddee Edinsmaier chosen for his three little human being babes, and not for his airplane babes, to move in here in particular? To have a mighty fine and appropriate dwelling for his three young chaps to play and to grow in? Perhaps it was because the wee and nondescript unit’s location, unlike his first 24th Street dominion, was only about 2½ minutes’ driving time from Herry’s branch laboratory. All of a sudden, though, true it was: my three active human children were not, on weekends, going eleven blocks north to at least two rooms to play in but were, instead, crammed into this darkened recess inside a characterless pile of brick and mortar. A tiny hidey‑hole where Zane, Jesse and Mirzah would spend 48 hours of every one of those hot and cold weeks, that’s every single weekend, of the last half of 1988. “How is this … healing?” I am thinking to and querying myself.
“O‑kaaay. Wha’da’ya s’pose your dad meant by that, Zane?” All Lego pieces fell silent, not even fingered, none even touched. All three Boys, sitting crossed‑legged now, just stared straight up at me as I turned around from the hallway portal to their bedroom and came back into the living room, shocked at my own children’s revelation to me yet trying so desperately not to show them any sign of horror.
Zane, so inquisitive, such a brilliantly perceptive creature all of his dozen years so far and possessing so giving a nature, too, also like Mirzah’s, I could see by his beseeching, yearning and questioning gaze, was so trying to make this thing he’d been told by Herry‑Daddee just ... not so. Anybody looking, anyone truly listening could have seen the immense sorrow in his and his brothers’ eyes. It didn’t take a supersmart grownup to figure out that, “If mama and daddy had never really gotten married, then even though I was about four months old and out of mama’s belly when I thought they actually did get married—but they didn’t, well then, then, … then I really am ... a bastard kid! An’ … and now? Now it’s also true that my little brothers are, too!”
* * * *
Having had suspicions all of my then 40 years about the true intent, the motive behind and the purpose of christianity and not really knowing most of the precepts and canons of the Earth’s other so‑called “great religions” but finding from what little I did know of them by this age of mine their true intents, motives and purposes also enormously suspect, this apocalypse of Zane’s this very day marked, for me standing alone there in the company and witness of only my three little babies, the very moment of my monumental distrust of any and all things forced, commanded and dominated by men. And of all those things that a person gets force‑fed over the course of her entire lifetime, my absolute and now total loathing of organized religion everywhere the World over began that day in earnest.
It would not be until 12 years later and coming to me from a like mind in Georgia living right next door to my tax dollar‑supported School of the Americas in Columbus which was therefore functioning ‘in my name’ that I would know of the thinking and writings of ecologist and feminist, Dr. Anne Primavesi, in her From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity. Where, in anyone’s World, is it written that Herry‑Daddee Edinsmaier can think up this fuck and then actually go ahead and do this? Perform this little itty bitty soliloquy of his to anybody … let alone, to his own little itty bitty kids?
Unless and because he thought himself to actually possess me as his slave, as other, as inferior, as not the measure by which he, Herry, had to live. I, the woman, the Not Male Professor Stoltenberg terms me as in his 1989 Refusing to Be A Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, I, the woman, was not the standard. Only he, the man, the adult male of our particular family coupling, was. The standard by which anything and everything in our lives was to be measured.
Including … whether we were actually––or thought “and spoken about” as actually––married … or not. Dr. Primavesi in her Chapter Seven, Ecofeminism and Christian Imagery, wherein she is there addressing also judaism, hinduism, buddhism and islam as well as the experiences of women in other traditions encompassing all races of humankind, writes of “church liturgy, the commonest experience of the christian tradition and one in which subliminal messages about sex‑gender roles are given an illusory aura of sanctity.”
It’s all in the image, isn’t it? The deception … of pureness, of holiness, of … correctness. Of … Human Being‑ness. And, therefore following of course, of power and dominion over. A male judge from his bench and in his written documentation of a decree that awarded sole custody of a little four‑year‑old boy to his unemployed father stated that the husband‑abused mother, the child’s solitary primary caregiver for all of his short 48 months and a part‑time college student 24 years old sporting a cropped bob, had better learn, among many other things the judge, the man, told her she needed to learn, “to look more like a woman” and, therefore, more like a mother. She needed to, he wrote and therefore decreed as law, grow out her hair long. That was his measure, his standard of what constituted her being considered by him as a good‑enough mother and, therefore, possibly being given the ‘award’ of the custody of the man’s property, his child, not her child, to her—exactly, of course, in a precise straight line with the thinking, the practices and the writings also of the ancient Greeks, of Aristotle, of Socrates and of Plato … all of whom taught their students, male only of course—those students, and, subsequently, all of recorded history since, that women were only the vehicle, the vessel for the production of a man’s creation, of a man’s seed. She, Woman, was not at all the reason that there were children in the World—that there is a World of human beings at all—according to ancient Greek men we so honor, revere and thereby oftentimes quote today. And, apparently, a whole host of countries, belief systems and religions elsewhere before and since these Greek ‘thinkers’—as well.
The obvious emphases are mine in these next five, excerpted paragraphs from the work of the Prophetess Dr. Rosalind Miles. From off of pages 102 through 106 of her The Sins of the Mothers, i.e. Chapter Five within her 2001 masterpiece edition of The Women’s History of the World dead on and straight up, Dr. Miles has the explanation for this … judge … of family law custody … and for other such Edinsmaier‑like pillared men in despotic positions of power:
“WHEN MAN MADE HIMSELF GOD, HE MADE WOMAN LESS THAN HUMAN. The reduction of the whole sex to the one basic function of childbearing did not make women more acceptable to the patriarchal opinion‑makers. On the contrary, downgraded from human being, woman stood revealed as ‘a most arrogant and intractable animal’ (per Julia O’Faolain in her 1973 Not in God’s Image: Woman in History)––and this monster, born of the father gods’ sleep of reason, came to threaten their days and haunt their nights for a thousand years and more. The consequent campaign of hate against women’s animal physicality, pursued from the dawn of Judaism to the birth of the early modern world, has now emerged as one of the most decisive historical facts in the story of women.
For women’s history is not composed of the history of external events in linear progression. Wars, dynasties and empires have come and gone within a shorter span of time, and with less impact on women’s lives, than the practice of menstrual taboos, for instance, or female infanticide. Such themes shape women’s lived experience far more than dates and deeds; and the patterns they create are continuous, circular, unchanging over many generations. The attack on women’s bodies that was one of the most marked consequences of the imposition of patriarchal monotheism has no convenient onset or conclusion––but it was a principal determining factor of every woman’s history over an extended period of time. It signaled, precipitated even, the decline of women into their long night of feudal oppression and grotesque persecution. Only the accelerating descent to the lowest pitch of physical misery could produce the momentum required for the slow climb back to … full humanity.
Why did women’s bodies become such a crucial battleground in the sex war? The answer to this lies at the heart of the masculine struggle for supremacy. By denoting women as separate, different, inferior and therefore rightly subordinate, men made women the first and largest out‑group in the history of the races. But it is impossible to exclude women totally from all the affairs of men. No other subordinated class, caste or minority lives as closely integrated with its oppressor as women do; the males of the dominant culture have to allow them into their homes, kitchens, beds. Control at these close quarters can be maintained only by inducing women to consent to their own downgrading. Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior, what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female … body? By destroying the basic site of human confidence and sense of self, by dumping in sexual guilt and physical disgust, men could ensure women’s insecurity and dependence. There is no mistaking the true nature and purpose of the worldwide, orchestrated, rising crescendo of onslaughts on women during these centuries. Every patriarch fulminating in denigration of the sex was engaged in as brutal a bid for women’s abject capitulation as the gang‑raping Mundurucu of the South Seas whose tribal boast was, ‘We tame our women with the banana.’ ” Recall Herry’s teaching the next and 21st Century generation of males spawned by three spurts of his own exalted haploid sperm cells Why Bicycles Are Better Than the Human Female … Body.
Prophetess Miles continues, “Yet the sheer volume of prescriptive material, the huge battery of devices aimed against women, while they argue the high level of male anxiety, imply too the strength of women’s resistance. For woman was an ‘intractable animal,’ and She displayed her brute unreason nowhere more clearly than in her refusal to acquiesce in her own subjection. The violence and continuance of the denunciations imply a consistency and continuance of the prohibited behavior that made all the prescriptions necessary in the first place. The battery of social and legal controls also indicate the exact areas of masculine anxiety; and there was no part of the female body that did not in some way give rise to panic, fear, anger, or deep dread.
For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy; from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust. … Within the face woman concealed one of her most potent and treacherous weapons, her tongue. A proverb found in almost all languages nervously insists that ‘the only good wife is a silent one.’ … The head was at least the seat of whatever reason a woman might have. From there down her body was nothing but ‘the devil’s playground’.”
And these paragraphs of the Prophetess’s? About Woman’s body? They just begin to skim the surface of the issues of the vagina and, by its extending physiology, ah er, by the reason of science!!! … menstrual blood. Over the course of recent, recorded history, that is at least the last 12 millennia or so, mothers, not fathers and not other men, are fucked through with such saws and proverbs as Dr. Edinsmaier’s bicycle one and along with related taboos down through history as i) “A woman’s body is filthy and vile and not a vessel for the law” and ii) “Three things are insatiable––the dessert, the grave and a woman’s cunt” both from the Arab area of the World, the first one Hindu worshippers’ Buddha himself stated about females and as regards their wielding absolutely no power whatsoever, and iii) from Jewish and some Native American tribal men, “A menstruous woman is the work of the Devil. A woman in her courses is not to gaze upon the sacred fire, sit in water, behold the sun or hold conversation with … a man.”
So. So this lawman, this particular judge? This one pronouncing law down upon a short‑haired mama and her four‑year‑old child? This supposedly ‘learned’ guy speaking and writing decrees, writing canons about a worthy‑enough mother’s hair length? From those times of the old Greek literal mother‑fuckers was he? This judge of Woman? No! No, he was not! He is from “the Year of Our Lord” … 2000 “AD” … in a country called the United States of America residing and decreeing custody laws in a county in the eastern part of allegedly the most highly educated state in the World’s supposedly most advanced and progressive Union, the State called Iowa. And signed by him into the law which currently governs this one, now very‑fucked young mama on the first and newest one of the 21st Century’s International Women’s Days, 08 March!
Considering Legion True’s phenomenon of flip‑reverse, Dr. Primavesi further writes, “Suppose you are a man, a member of a predominantly male congregation. All through your church life you have heard only women’s voices lead in prayer and only they have preached. You have seen only women preside at rituals in the sanctuary, and only they have blessed or absolved the living and the dead. You have heard only feminine words used for yourself and your fellow worshippers. You have been assured that these are intended to be inclusive of both sexes; that whenever the officiating woman says womankind she means all humanity. You are presumed to understand that when you sing of the Motherhood of God and the Sisterhood of Woman you are praying that all men as well as women come to experience true sisterhood. Your son is baptized, and the congregation thanks God that he has been reborn as God’s daughter.
How do you feel when you notice that feminine words and imagery alone are used for God? You ask about this and are told that these are merely semantic forms, and that, of course, since God is transcendent, there is no question that She is female in a sexual sense. If you persist and find the nerve to protest about the exclusive use of ‘Mother of God’, saying that it does something to your sense of male dignity and integrity, a learned cleric may explain that in the matriarchal society which formed the tradition of the wording of scripture, liturgy and theology could emerge only in matriarchal language.
You may press on and ask why, when there is a real effort now in society at large to redress the effects of matriarchy, little or nothing, is being done in Christian churches. Then you will be told that while Christians believe that God is ultimately beyond sexual categorization, She sent Her Daughter down into this fallen world to make God known to us, and that we know that God is fully revealed in Her. Furthermore, this Daughter called God ‘Mother’ and told us to do the same. During Her life, She passed on Her intimate knowledge of God to some chosen women friends She called My Disciples, and they passed it on to others. This means Christians can be sure they are right when they speak about God and claim a special relationship with Her. This relationship is made possible through the power of Her Spirit handed on to chosen women who hand it on to others.
If you still persist in your questioning you may ask, if God is asexual, have females only been chosen to represent this God. Then you will be told that as in Eve all women sinned, then through God’s Daughter all womankind will be redeemed. As Adam and Nature led Eve into sin, so they are to be subordinate to her. As ordained representatives of the Daughter Who has saved us, women have the power to baptize men into a new relationship with God whereby they also are made God’s daughters. 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. Primacy is given to female bodies and imagery since they are associated with the revelation of God in Her Daughter and our Redemption by that Daughter.” It’s all in the image, isn’t it?
At least––until Reason … prevails. And there’s finally—altogether—none of this god/goddess/fairies’ telling of tales! This peace of mind will be a long, long time in coming—what with an actual majority of the members of the current United States Congress (publicly stating, anyhow, their) believing in the magic and the fantasy of the fairies known in all of christendom and very many other religions, too, as … angels.
* * * *
[to be continued next week…]
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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