Cunt (7 page)

The evils of our blood recede when—however fleetingly—we’re free from the demands
of this unfeeling world. When we sit reverent and peaceful. When those around us respect
our silence. This is when the negative becomes positive.

Every woman has a different way of honoring her blood.

Every so often, Bambi, my housemate, has a ritual of painting fantastic gold leaf
menstrual homages, framed in total baroque. Bambi’s not a painter, she’s a musician.
Her period tells her when it’s time for another painting. “I seem to make one every
eighteen months or so,” says Bambi. She has no idea why she started painting with
her menstrual blood in gold.

Some women cook fabulous dinners for themselves, some save up money to take in a weekend
by the sea.

When you open yourself up to learn how to honor yourself, the
how
part just falls into place via your imagination, passion and lifestyle.

It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean
with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding,
our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes.
In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not—at first—be comfortable.
She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take
her world by storm. When we’re quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to
dilemmas that’ve been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany
rumba ’cross de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel
antipathy towards a bodily ritual that so profoundly and routinely reinforces our
cuntpower.

Just because I don’t envision myself in a romantic, sexual relationship with a man
anymore, doesn’t mean I never have.

The first time I got pregnant, I was nineteen and living in the agricultural community
on the California coast where I’d lived all my life. A mere two weeks separated me
from my move away from home to Seattle. Making such a major move with a tiny human
growing inside my body seemed a pretty contradictory way of setting off on my own.

The thoroughly unsavory “option” of hanging around town for nine months and then giving
my child to an adoption agency didn’t hold my attention for more than two puffs off
the continuous cigarette I’d had in my mouth since I got back my test results.

So I went to Planned Parenthood for a clinical abortion. In the waiting room, there
always seemed to be fifteen or twenty other women, no matter how many left with the
nurse.

Evidently, it was “abortion day.”

We were shuffled through the clinic like beef cows. All of the women had the same
horror-stricken, empty look on their faces. It was one of those situations where one
can assume one holds the same expression as everyone else without looking in the mirror.
I sat there for an hour and a half, nervously leafing through
People
magazine, in a desperate attempt to give a rat’s ass about the lives of Darryl Hannah
and Whitney Houston.

When they called my name, I probably would have shit my pants if there had been any
digestion going on in my intestines, which there wasn’t. It’s hard to eat when you’re
pregnant with a child you do not want.

My boyfriend accompanied me into the exam room. I was told to strip and lay on the
table, feet in the stirrups. I still remember the ugly swirl designs and water marks
on the ceiling. After a while, the nurse came in and explained what would be happening.

She referred to the machine used for clinical abortions as a “suction device,” which
is a more professional way of saying “vacuum cleaner.” In theory, if not design, this
machine is quite like the Hoover Upright, the Dust Buster or the Shop-Vac in your
closet at home.

The nurse didn’t mention how useful vacuum cleaners are for cleaning up messes. In
our society, a pile of kitty litter on the floor is treated much the same as an undesired
embryo. The main difference, though hardly recognizable to Western science, is that
kitty litter is sucked from cold linoleum and an embryo is sucked from a warm-blooded
living being’s womb.

Instead, because I was crying like
La Llorana
, she said, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

What other goddamn choice did I have?

I muttered, “Just do it, please.”

With the ugliest needle I’d ever seen, she shot something into my cervix. I don’t
think my cervix was residing under the belief that it would someday have a large needle
plunged into it, and so protested accordingly. The pain was overwhelming; my head
swam into the netherworld between intense clarity and murky subconscious.

Then I heard a quiet motor whirring.

The lady told me to recite my ABCs.

“A, B, C, D, E ... ” Something entered my cunt, deeper, deeper, deeper than I imagined
anything could possibly go.

“F, G, H, I, O, W ... ” The walls of my uterus were being sucked, felt like they were
gonna cave in. I screamed, “O, P, X, X, D, VOWELS, WHAT ARE THE VOWELS? R? K? A! A’s
A VOWEL!“ And then my organs were surely being mowed down by a tiny battalion of Lawn-Boys.

“S, did I say S?” My boyfriend was crying too, didn’t tell me whether I said S or
not.

There was a white-wall-tire pad between my legs then, and blood gushed out of me.
The motor had stopped whirring. I was delirious. I asked, “What do you do with all
the fetuses? Where do they go? Do you bury them?” The lady ignored me, which was fine,
I had to puke. She led me into a bathroom and I vomited biley green foam. Then I went
to a recovery room, lay down and cried.

There was another nurse woman in there, she patted my hand, reassured me, “I know
just how you feel.”

“You’ve had an abortion before too?”

“No, but I know how you feel.”

I told her to get the fuck away from me.

For two weeks, there was a gaping wound in the center of my body. I could hardly walk
for five days.

Then, stupid me, a couple of years later, I got pregnant again. I still lived in Seattle,
but was just about to move to Olympia, to begin school at Evergreen.

I couldn’t really envision myself having an academic edge with a bun in the oven,
so I faced the reality of going to that machine once again. This time I was more terrified
than before. I knew all too well what that rectangular box and its quiet motor had
planned for my reproductive system.

Have you any idea how it feels to willingly and voluntarily submit to excruciating
torture because you dumbly forgot to insert your diaphragm which gives you ugly yeast
infections and hurts you to fuck unless you lie flat on your back anyway? I was to
withstand this torture because I was a
bad girl.
I didn’t do good. I fucked up.

I had the same choice as before, that glowing, outstanding choice for which we ladies
fight tooth and nail: the choice to get my insides ruthlessly sucked by some inhuman
shitpile, not invented by my foremothers, but by someone who would never, ever in
a million years have that tube jammed up his dickhole and turned on full blast, slurping
everything in its path.

Abortion #2 took place in a clinic that was under so much political pressure, I wasn’t
even allowed to recuperate. Twenty minutes after the vacuum cleaner was out of my
body, I was dressed and walking home.

Felt like a piece of shit.

On one of Olympia’s main thoroughfares is an abortion clinic. I passed it every day
on my way to and from school. Almost always, there were old women, young girls and
duck hunters standing on the corner outside the clinic, holding signs in their hands
showing you pictures of a dead fetuses with some words underneath to the effect that
this may have been the next president of the United States of America.

Whenever I saw those people out there, especially the young girls, I’d see myself
yanking the bus cord—in all probability, snapping it in two—vaulting off the bus,
crossing the street and morphing into a walking killing machine, kicking in faces,
stomping on hands. There were times when I gripped my wrist so I wouldn’t yank that
cord.

At this point in my life, I’d begun to study different kinds of medicines and healing
methods. One thing I learned in college was that knowledge helps me transcend anger.
Upon examining my desire to physically assault individuals whose convictions were
in direct opposition to mine, I delved into histories and applications of medicines
far and wide. At the same time, I was hanging around with a group of women who were
asking a lot of compelling questions about our reproductive systems. We found many
of the readily available answers to be thoroughly unsatisfactory, and started discovering
our own.

In this research, we found one constant: healing starts from within. It appeared to
be some kind of law. No, more than a law. Is breathing a law? Is waking up every morning
a law? If so, maybe the notion of healing coming from within is a law as well.

This concept is completely alien, even deviant, in our culture.

In this society, we look to the outside for just about everything: love, entertainment,
well-being, self-worth and health. We stare into the TV set instead of speaking of
our own dreams, wait for a vacation instead of appreciating each day, watch the clock
rather than listen to our hearts. Every livelong day we are bombarded with realities
from the outside world, seemingly nonstop. Phones, car alarms, pills, coffee, beepers,
ads, radios, elevator music, fax machines, gunshots, bright lights, fast cars, airplanes
overhead, computer screens, sirens, alcohol, newspapers. One hardly has the opportunity
to look inside for love and peace and other nice things like that.

Western medicine, that smelly, deaf dog who farts across the house and that we just
don’t have the heart to put out of its misery, is based on a law opposed to the one
the rest of the universe seems to go by, namely: Healing Has Nothing to Do with You,
Just Follow the Directions on the Label.

In America, we don’t (nor are we encouraged to) look inside ourselves for healing,
finding truths or answers. If you want to know something, you find out what the Person
in Charge of This Area says. The weather is not to be discerned by looking at the
sky, the mountains in the distance, or by listening to the song of the wind. You will
find it in the Report of the Meteorologist. And likewise, if you are pregnant and
don’t want to be, you don’t look to yourself and the immediate, personal resources
in your immediate, personal world, you pay a visit to the Abortionist, who will subsequently
predict the climate in your body for two weeks, guaranteed.

And so, la dee dah, once, twice, three times a cuntlovin’ lady, I got pregnant again.
It was the same boyfriend as the other two times only now we were breaking up. It
was the fuckedest one of all because I didn’t want to be with this man and I shouldn’t
have fucked him, but it was his birthday and he was obviously fun to romp with and
blah dee blah blah blah. No force on earth could make me feel like I wanted this child.
Furthermore, I promptly decided there was to be no grotesque waltz with that abhorrent
machine.

So, I started talking to my friends about abortion alternatives. I lived in a small
town with a high population of like-minded cuntlovin’ women, so that was one thing
in my favor right there. Against me was the fact that I was eight weeks along, which
is too advanced for an organically induced miscarriage. According to naturopathic
physician Loraine Harkin, six weeks of pregnancy is the outside limit for herbal abortions.
Since they are effective about 60 percent of the time, she says it’s important to
schedule a surgical abortion since a fetus is most sensitive to the harmful effects
of herbs and drugs in the first eight weeks of pregnancy. I made an appointment at
the women’s clinic (the one with the protesters, who’d since moved on to haunt other
neighborhoods) as a back-up in case my way didn’t work out.

My dear friend Judy, the masseuse and scientist, was my biggest resource. She and
Panacea found some herbal tea recipes a Boston anarchist-feminist group printed. (I
tried to contact this group, but they had evidently disbanded.)

Judy came to my house almost every night and massaged my uterus where you are not
supposed to massage pregnant women who want to keep their babies. She also did reflexology
by rubbing either side of my Achilles tendon on both feet.

I knew a naturopath in Olympia, who was one of my sources of inspiration in learning
about healing from within. She taught me this thing called “imaging.” It may sound
terribly New Age, but through imaging, I got rid of this weird bump I’d had on my
labia
all my life.
Since imaging goes on in your own head, I can’t tell you how to do it specifically.
The basic idea is:
Every
night, when you are falling asleep, graphically imagine the part of your body that’s
giving you problems
changing.
For the bump on my labia, I imagined all this beautiful soft flesh growing over and
absorbing the bump. When I was pregnant, I
vividly, consistently
(I do believe these are the operative words when imaging) imagined the walls of my
uterus gently shedding.