Autonomy

The worst part of being created and birthed solely to forward someone else’s agenda is that even your body is not viewed as your own. Take, for instance, my ears: I had to beg and plead for my ears to be pierced at the age of four, and it was only after I promised and demonstrated how I’d take care of them perfectly (for years) that my father signed off on the desecration of my corporeal form.

Content warning: Psychological abuse, child abuse, religious trauma.

I took this so seriously that I didn’t want to tell my parents when my ears hurt or became infected. I was afraid to tell them when I discovered a metal allergy and couldn’t wear the dangly earrings my aunt bought—but it hardly mattered, because I wasn’t supposed to wear dangly earrings until I was more mature. Until I was a woman.

We went to a non-denominational church which by today’s standards would be two steps to the right of modern evagelicalism. Women were not to wear makeup, flashy jewelry, or dresses shorter than their knees. Pants were not allowed.

Men were supposed to be clean-shaven, but my father insisted on keeping his Creeper ‘Stache. He needed to feel like a rebel. He needed his caged little songbird—my mother—to reflect well on him as they performed at the head of the church, so he told her she could adorn her face and ears as long as it “looked natural.”

“Makeup should only enhance your natural beauty,” they both told me on so many occasions. “It shouldn’t attempt to create something that isn’t there.”

“Have you ever heard the term, ‘Putting lipstick on a pig?’” My father once quipped to Mom in the front seat. “That’s what your sister looked like today.”

When I was thirteen and they were divorcing, Mom finally agreed to let me pierce my ears a second time. I knew she was only doing it to piss my father off, but I didn’t care. They were my ears, and it was ridiculous that he thought he should have a say over them.

When he discovered the new studs, his face registered a terrifying range of emotions and potential responses to what I’d done. My eyes met his, startled, and watched the process from closer to his left cheek. Being smacked around by Mom over the years had taught me that this was what she meant when she said, “Look into my eyes”—so I held my gaze, projecting calm.

He realized he was going to have to hold me down and rip them out in order to “win” this fight, so he told me I could keep them.

This lit a fire in me which quickly blazed out of control. I’d never realized before that no one else could direct my body but me. I could eat what I wanted, drink what I wanted, smoke what I wanted, and kiss as many boys as I wanted. I also had as much time and freedom as I wanted, because Dad was never home. When he was, he hung out in his room with a bottle of wine and watched movies. This was new—I assumed he was heart-broken and felt guilty for pressuring him to end it.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone when I ended up pregnant a couple years later—after running wild and witnessing things for an entire summer that make me blush now.

“You’ll be having it,” my father said on the walk we took to discuss this. His voice was cold and hard.

“I’ve decided I’ll be keeping it, yes.” I’d chosen my words carefully. I’d already run through my options during weeks of denial. I’d meditated on this, feeling like my world was over—and I’d had my first vision of the woman on the cover of Pandora’s Box MX. She somehow let me know everything would be okay. Somehow, everything was going according to plan.

“I’ll be the best grandpa in the world,” he said, his voice sounding tearful. I thought that meant he’d be a good dad to me and maybe help me out in the beginning, but it turned out I was wrong.

“You can stay as long as you need,” he promised. And I believed him. I thought my dad was such a nice guy.

My mother had a different stance.

“Please don’t do this,” she begged. “You’re so young—just a kid yourself. What about your education? What about your dreams? You were going to be a writer and live in a high rise downtown. You didn’t even want kids.”

What she was saying was true. Every bit of it was correct—only I’d been seeing signs that this was meant to happen for more than two years. It wasn’t that I wanted it to happen—though a small part of me did, in retrospect—as much it had felt… destined. I was meant to have this baby. In my mind, it had nothing to do with them.

But they saw this very differently. To my mother, I had always been a doll. I was a mini-her—up to and including how much she hated herself. To my father, I was the family historian and bearer of future lines. To them, my choice had everything to do with them and nothing to do with me. I was but a vessel.

No, I’m not being dramatic. If you’ve read this, this, or this, you already know how far my father was willing to go to get my kids back into his loop—and that’s not anywhere near the extent of it.

For my mom’s part, she’d been socialized to believe her ticket to salvation was through him, and the way to his heart was through controlling me. It had been her job to turn me into the woman he wanted me to be—no matter what the cost to me personally. But when they split, she suddenly had no metric for my success. Everything he’d guided her to be had led to her ruination, and she didn’t want that for me.

So I now understand that she was coming from a place of love when she insisted I abort the fetus.

“The fetus,” my father spat. “She won’t even recognize that it’s a baby.”

Because it wasn’t, not yet. I was already out of my first trimester, but just barely. I was pregnant enough to sense he was a boy who wanted to stay, but not near enough along for… well, anything. He was the size of a kidney bean. But to my mom, he was the rest of my life—and in retrospect, she was absolutely not wrong.

“What about college?” She cried.

“I’ll still go,” I told her.

“Less than 5% of teen moms graduate from college!” She wailed.

“I’ll still graduate,” I assured her. “It’ll just be a little harder.”

She shook her head slowly, her eyes full of tears. “I don’t think you have any idea how difficult this is going to be.”

And yet again, she was not wrong. I did become one of the 5%, but it wasn’t for many years—and my life has been immeasurably horrible in a million other ways since. But none of that was my son’s fault. I never blamed or resented him in the way she foresaw, because she and I were built differently. She started a family in service of my father, and I started a family in shaky service of myself—of becoming my own person, raising a future man I loved, and trusting that he’d be a part of something good, fair and true someday.

In this moment, I feel let down by my faith. Everything did not, in fact, turn out okay. We have all suffered so needlessly, and I have no way of knowing if any of my kids will ever recover from the damage my father and his network did, quite intentionally, over the course of decades. This doesn’t even speak to the lifetime of friends and networking contacts they’ve never allowed me, and the “helpful conversations” they had with my partners, colleagues and friends so they could say, “Whoops! She failed again.” “Whoops! No more home.” “Whoops! No more job.” “Whoops! No more health.” No more her.

“Whoops!” Indeed.

This is the kind of America we’re headed toward, people: The one where children are taught to speak in tongues but told they’re crazy when they speak the truth about their own families. The one where women represent only our reproductive capacity in the face of no other choices. The one where we’re defined by how we represent our men—until they have no further use for us, and then we’re cursed for not knowing how to represent ourselves. We die in our children’s homes, surrounded by the only things allowed to determine who we are, were, or ever will be—the stories of their childhoods.

I say, No, thank you. Do you hear how polite I am? I say, Fuck no. I will not be erased, and I will not allow my silence to pave the way for future abuses to countless other women.

My escape is no longer enough. My surviving by a thread just isn’t going to cut it anymore. I refuse to redefine myself yet again in order to escape their spoilage. I can’t do it anymore—and no more women should have to do this, either. We’ve fought too hard to willingly walk back into the noose.

So no, again, I see no reason to stop. What they’ve done already can’t really be much worse for our boys. Loneliness epidemics? Body counts? Against birth control and abortion… and child support? Against food stamps, health care and education? C’mon!

We can do better. Don’t let my life be your life. I’ve fought too hard for the most basic level of autonomy—fought, and in many ways, lost—for anyone else to give it away so willingly. We don’t exist in the service of men—and it’s about time they read the f*cking memo.

About the Author

Marissa McGregor writes from a cottage on the shores of Lake Chapala, Mexico, where she is reclaiming her life after decades of silencing and erasure. Her work wrestles with the personal and the political, unflinching in explorations of abuse, survival, and the high cost of truth-telling in a world sliding toward authoritarianism. She writes not only to tell her story, but to call others to attention—to refuse complacency and insist on a different future.

She spends her days gardening and exploring nature with her dog, two cats and mare, Pandora.