At 3 a.m. I scrawl, I crawl to my little blue book by my bedside and I write down my dream in deep delirium:
Eve only ate the fruit because she was trying to impress Adam by being a bada**. The patriarchy was the original evil.
Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. I got ashes last Wednesday.
I was confronted by four different but equally concerned and confused "good Christian" boys.
Are you joking? Is this a joke? Are you mocking my religion? You know what you have done. You are not a good Christian girl. How can you wear that on your forehead? Take that off. You are the last person I’d ever expect to see with a cross.
I grew up in a Catholic family. I went to Mass every Sunday, got confirmed, pray the Our Father before each family supper. I’m a semi-practicing Catholic, not that that’s anyone’s business but mine. See, there I go again, having to qualify my religion, my identity. It would be too much to ask to be recognized as a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, thinking, feeling being. It is exhausting having to dilute myself down to be digestible. It is frustrating having to preface every statement I make in class with deference.
Excusing myself out of intelligence so as not to step on any toes. So as not to force anyone into seeing more to me than blonde curls and red nails. I am hollow, a thin glass ornament dangling on a limb. I am about to fall.
I’m reminded of an old Life Magazine I bought at a ramshackle yard sale this summer. On the cover is Eve as we envision her: coyly covered in a strategically-placed leaf, clutching the fruit that made us fall. Next to her a 70s feminist in all-over denim, steel-blue accusatory eyes boomeranging the blame in the opposite direction. She is unframing Eve, liberating her from her portraited, fetishized cage.
That poor girl. Mankind’s scapegoat. I want to hug that girl. I know what it’s like to be that girl. To live life blamed, labeled, branded a distraction, a contradiction. I am chaos. I am a temptress. I am disorder I am mystery I am a secret I am fat I am thin I am smart-- too smart and not smart enough -- I am nothing sometimes and everything other times. I am a woman. I am caged. I am coloring inside lines that I myself did not draw.
In 1854, Coventry Patmore coined the prescription for a woman to be “An Angel in the House.” He constructs a wife perfect and perfectly humble, beautiful and beautifully blind to all his faults, innocent and wild, passive, agreeable, doting, faithful, you know the story. The same woman we see serving pink martinis and peddling a pink Hoover. The Lululemon-clad, latte-chugging, selfie (119-pound) stickin’ liberal arts dime.
Though we’ve seemingly evolved past the 19th century Cult of Domesticity’s dictation of a woman’s place being in the home, we’re still reducing women to perform simple actions as single-adjective cells.
Be a lady in the streets, a freak in the sheets. And if you plan on getting a boyfriend in college, you can refer to this 50 tip how-to, with desirable qualities including (but not limited to) “1. Be younger than us,” “15. Have an attractive mother,” “6. There’s nothing less sexy than insecurity. Except maybe love handles.”
I feel out of control; I am waxing and waning by the hands of circumstance. Trying to patch together a piecemeal persona while constantly having to check myself into boxes prescribed to me. It’s hard to remind myself to be myself, to unframe myself.
No sir, I am not mocking your religion. I am mocking your rules.
Little phoenix rising from the ashes.
